About

Decentraland is a user-owned virtual world where individuals can create, explore, and trade in an open-world environment. Users can create and sell wearable items, construct scenes and experiences, set up personal spaces, and browse, rent and sell virtual land within the platform. The platform also hosts daily events such as parties, art exhibitions, and music festivals. Decentraland includes a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for governance, providing users control over the rules of the virtual world.

History

Decentraland is a decentralized, traversable, three-dimensional (3D), virtual reality platform being built on the Ethereum blockchain. The platform focuses on the ownership of parcels of digital land where users can create unique environments in a virtual world. Content creators will be able to prove ownership of, and capture value from, their contributions to the platform. Users will be able to traverse unique areas of content, which can be clustered into districts, giving content creators targeted traffic and allow for spatial discovery of new content by users.

Currently, users gather, interact, share content, and play games primarily on large proprietary platforms like Facebook. The team believes that a decentralized model will allow participants to realize several benefits over current centralized services. Users and contributors will be able to benefit from transactions that occur on the platform, instead of allowing some or all of the revenue to flow to a single party. Furthermore, a decentralized platform will reduce the risk of censorship and vulnerabilities due to infrastructure failures or security breaches.

Decentraland uses two tokens, LAND and MANA, which allow users to interact with the platform. Individual ownership of land parcels are represented by non-fungible LAND tokens containing the coordinates of a single point on the grid and a reference to the details of each parcel. Ownership details are managed through a ledger on a smart contract. To acquire LAND users must burn ERC20 based MANA tokens. MANA tokens are also used for the purchase of in-game goods and services.

In Dec. 2017, the first LAND tokens representing parcels in the first part of the game, Genesis City, were auctioned off. In March 2018, the Decentraland Marketplace was released allowing users to buy and sell parcels (LAND) in Genesis City as well as explore the area on a map. As of May 2018, the platform was still under development. The team plans to roll out access to the Decentraland world through a variety of devices including mobile, web and virtual reality (VR) platforms.