What is Decentraland? - A virtual world built with open standards

What is Decentraland?

A decentralized virtual world, open to the public and built open source. The idea is that you can make your own universe and interact with it, except Decentraland calls it a metaverse. Virtual reality on the blockchain is what moved me to want to look deeper and find out about this virtual world created on the Ethereum blockchain known as Decentraland. So in this post for those of you who may have never heard of it, I will introduce the blockchain based virtual world and explore it's features with you.

At first maybe when you think of Decentraland you might see blockchain, technology, immersive virtual reality. If that is somewhat the idea you get than you are sort of right. Decentraland is a decentralized virtual reality platform. But the real importance lies in decentralizing VR and allowing the platform users to control the immersive platform and to do things that they normally wouldn't be able to with other similar platforms. Meaning this is a virtual reality platform unlike most you have probably used.

You can do a lot of things with this platform and with it you have opportunities to piece together your own universe. Your imagination is the only limit on what you can create.

Decentraland is a blockchain based virtual world.

How does it work?

In very basic words, you build and create your own world and interact with it through virtual reality headsets. The idea is that you are able to create, experience, and monetize content and applications.

Back to the point on building and creating anything imaginable in a virtual space. Whatever piece you own of the decentraland virtual world, using blockchain technology that piece gets recorded and so you can keep track of who owns what.

Land is the currency of this decentralized environment where the more of it you own, the more you can do with Dencentraland's platform. More on that go here.

It is interesting because Land is not a real thing, but only something stored in a smart contract and distributed when purchased, also Land is permanently owned. To buy Land you have to use Mana which is Decentralands cryptocurrency. With Mana you use it to create your own 3D realistic objects or places, but as well as applications that are more complex.

What you see and what you interact with in this virtual reality space are known as scenes, building scenes are as easy as using the Decentraland sdk reference shown here.

Building a Decentraland scene:

Example taken from Decentraland YouTube channel

Scenes become relevant once you start to see how it all comes together from scratch, building and creating using the Decentraland platform.

As well as building scenes there is a marketplace for trading and managing all of your Decentraland assets.

Specifically, the Marketplace allows you to:
Publish a parcel of LAND for sale, setting your own price in MANA and an expiration date for the offer.
Buy a parcel that is for sale.
Name your parcel and give it a description.
Transfer your LAND to a different user.
Control the parcels you own and visualize the contributions you’ve made to districts.
Explore the world through a map to see who owns what.

Here is how the Decentraland marketplace looks from a first glance point of view:

Building on Decentraland

You can build just about anything you want in this virtual reality decentralised platform while using the Decentraland SDK and control your own world as long as it's in your Land parrcel (which you can buy in the marketplace using MANA). What you build can range from scenes which are scenery for your own virtual world, to crypto games. I am excited for the future in Decentraland especially for the reason I would want to play a crypto game in full immersive VR.

To start building a "metaverse" you can start by going to their official website and testing out the platform for yourself. Decentraland can be tested and is not just another idea but a real working product. The full product isn't released yet so there are some things to look forward to.

When building a scene you want to build, test, then deploy. These things can be done using the following commands.

To learn more read the docs here.

Do you invest?

Based on the idea, I would invest some of my portfolio into a project that sounds as interesting as this one. But not before I look at the short and long term possibilities and research the projects history. So I will be doing some of that for you right here. Of course always do your own research before thinking of investing into something, especially a cryptocurrency.

Decentraland raised:
$24,137,000
OF
$20,000,000 (121%)

Current Market cap is about:
$80,496,231

Circulating supply (HIGH):
1,050,141,509 MANA

ATH price:
Approximately $0.24

ICO price:
$0.024

Token sale date ended:
August of 2017

Does it have a real use case?

Will it survive, and does it stand a chance to gain traction as more developers begin building metaverses? Maybe the next HUGE dApp will be a vitrual reality one. These are some of the possiblities and questions I look at when thinking of a cryptocurrencies future. I am not the future teller and do not want to be responsible for letting you down, but I do see this cryptocurrency having a strong forseeable future for the folllowing reasons.

• Strong team of developers and early bitcoin adopters.
• Very strong community behind this project, which means even in times of complete uncertainty and doubt in the crypto-sphere projects like this will "return from the dead".
• Prototype since last August 2017. Meaning code has been developing for almost a year and the project has had people test it already. AKA a real product not a promising idea.

I think Decentraland's use case is to push the gaming industry forward, which is a huge industry already. So in my mind all it takes is one very successful game or maybe some news to bring in the right amount of adoption that a project like this one deserves. Of course as well you should have a look for yourself and let me know what you think about Decentraland in the comments below.

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