Decentraland

What is Decentraland? 

• Decentraland is a virtual reality platform that is powered by the Ethereum blockchain. This is a virtual world where users are given the opportunity to purchase plots of land that they can move across, build upon and monetize in the long term. 
• In this world, the places you interact with are called LAND, where each LAND is a non-fungible token (NFT) that is purchasable within the game. 
• Once you own this plot of LAND, you can do whatever you want with it. This means that you can create games, applications, and LAND-based services.
• Users can vote on district issues through the decentralized voting application (dApp), where the weight of the vote is determined by the amount of LAND a user holds.
• The platform has created a marketplace where users are able to buy, sell and trade NFTs, which creates an economic incentive for the avatars to become truly unique and personalized.

Key Metrics

Ticker	MANA
Token Name	Decentraland
Token Type/Protocol	ERC-20 token
Total Token Supply	2,194,047,327
Current Circulating Supply	See Coinmarketcap
Market Capitalisation	See Coinmarketcap
Token Creation Date	February 2020
Can it be mined?	No

Who is behind Decentraland? 

The people behind Decentraland are Ariel Meilich and Esteban Ordano. They have both stepped down from major positions at the project after initially creating it, but remain advisors. Esteban Ordano was Decentraland’s tech lead and had a history working at BitPay as a software engineer and being an advisor at the Matic Network. Additionally, Decentraland also has a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that turns over the project management for the users. MANA is the native cryptocurrency token that powers Decentraland and is an ERC-20 token that is required to purchase LAND and pay for in-game items and services.

What is the purpose of Decentraland? 

Decentraland is intended to be a social experience where users can interact with each other and be a part of a community. It is a virtual world where users can also build, buy and sell digital real-estate, artworks, or other in-world items as NFT tokens.

Insights:

• There are two different tokens that govern the operations in Decentraland, including LAND, the NFT token, and MANA, which facilitates purchases of LAND or any other virtual items in-game.
• Any changes in the Decentraland Software occur through smart contracts, where participants that own MANA can vote on specific updates.
• Decentraland has a consensus layer that tracks the ownership of land parcels.
• The content layer controls what happens with each parcel. 
• There are files that are required to render each parcel, including content files, script files, and interaction definitions.
• Players essentially have their own personal spaces that they can fill with games, activities, artworks, and other goodies that players can interact with, and each avatar can be customized with unique wearables. 
• This is all made available as an NFT token, which can be bought and sold on the Decentraland Marketplace.

Risks:

• There are risks of exploitation as a result of cyberattacks – although this is a risk shared with all cryptocurrencies.
• There is a lot of competition within virtual world gaming at the moment – there are various other NFT based gaming tokens all competing for a share of the pie.
• Virtual plots of lands (LAND) are relatively expensive purchases that price out alot of retail investors.

News and Updates:

• Atari announced their collaboration with Decentraland, and they are planning to take a large estate in the virtual world to allow players to play Atari’s iconic games, including Centipede, Missile Command, Pong, Asteroids, and others.
• Decentraland proposed a communication protocol update to enhance user interaction to support wider communication to create a scalable world.
• The Archipelago update essentially changed the coding structure and organized peers in “islands” according to their positions in the world, so that information could be used to organize the P2P network.

Community & Whitepaper Links:

Official Website:  https://decentraland.org/
White Paper: https://decentraland.org/whitepaper.pdf 

Disclaimer  

All investments are speculative and involve substantial risk and uncertainty. Investors should understand the nature of digital assets, including the terms of return and the risk of assets. We encourage investors to fully understand the assets and the risk associated with them prior to making any investment.