Decentraland’s native token, MANA hit an all-time high of $5.90, pushing its market capitalization to as high as $10.67 billion, overtaking rival play-to-earn platform Axie Infinity whose market capitalization stands at $8.2 billion as of the time of this writing.

MANA is on its way to becoming a member of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization as demand for metaverse and play-to-earn tokens have increased since Facebook announced their name change, showcasing their new focus on metaverse and virtual reality development.

MANA has surged by over 500% in price since Facebook’s announcement in October. At the time, the total market capitalization for the platform stood at $2 billion.

What you should know

Juan Pellicer, an analyst at IntoTheBlock, explained that the recent waves of transactions for MANA of over $100,000, could be signaling institutional demand. He stated, “Investors are still wanting to capitalize on the narrative of the metaverse since the rebranding of Facebook.”

Another reason for the rally in the price could be as a result of the platforms virtual real estate plot sales. Reuters reported on Monday that a Tokens.com subsidiary, the Metaverse Group, bought a patch of virtual real estate in the Decentraland metaverse for 618,000 MANA, the equivalent to around $3.1 million at the time of this writing.

Conclusion

Play-to-earn and metaverse related tokens have been on an uptrend in the last few weeks. On Monday, Sandbox’s SAND token reached record highs after Adidas teased a partnership between the two companies. The platform is also launching an alpha release of its metaverse on the 29th of November.