Decentraland is a 3D Virtual Reality Gaming Platform

Days ago, a plot of LAND on Deentraland sold for a record high price US$2.4 Million worth of the in-game cryptocurrency MANA. Singers from all over the world were holding concerts in the metaverse of The Decentraland where a century-old auction house also displayed the art pieces. So what on earth is Decentraland?

What is Decentraland?

Created in 2015 by Argentinian blockchain experts Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, Decentraland was officially launched in 2017 and runs on Ethereum blockchain. It is a 3D virtual reality gaming platform that is pretty much like what people call the “Metaverse”. Both of the two founders have stepped down from the leading roles but still serve as advisors to the project. Decentraland now is managed by the foundation New Decentraland DAO.

As described in its whitepaper, Decentraland is a virtual world where users can buy, develop and sell LAND which represents as a format of an non-fungible ERC-721 token. Purchasers of LAND on the platform can choose what content they would like to show on their portion of LAND. Users can even build their own interactive games on it. To purchase LAND assets, users have to own the in-game token MANA first. Leading Exchanges including, Bianance, FTX, FAMEEX and OKEx have listed MANA already.

The in-game marketplace enables players to sell or buy their LAND assets which are priced in MANA. 

Decentraland builds three layers in its protocol which are the consensus layer, the LAND content layer and the real-time layer. The consensus layer maintains a ledger tracking land ownership. LAND ownership is established at this layer and each parcel of LAND refers to a unique coordinate. The LAND content layer controls every move within each parcel. And the real-time layer is enabling users to connect to each other with voice chat and messaging functions.

The Digital Assets LAND and MANA

As mentioned above, there are two digital assets in the Decentraland ecosystem. Firstly, a plot of LAND represents an NFT whose total supply is 90,601 stored in an Ethereum smart contract. In addition to the built-in marketplace, users can purchase LAND assets on the largest NFT marketplace, Opensea as well. However, LAND assets sold on the in-game marketplace would be priced in MANA whereas those on Opensea would be priced in Ether.

The ERC-20 token MANA is the Decentraland’s native currency which has multiple uses, including in-game purchases of goods and services and governance. Any issues regarding the community can be voted on Decentraland’s voting decentralised application (dApp). Ranked number one by market capitalization, MANA has a fixed supply of around 2.2 billion tokens and now there are more than 1.8 billion MANA in circulation.