Do you remember The Sims – the life-simulation video game that was first released in 2000? Players could create virtual people called “Sims” and place them in houses. The world has changed a lot since then – and now blockchain-based games taking games like “The Sims” to the next level with cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and even virtual real estate.
One such virtual reality platform is Decentraland which is powered by blockchain technology, where you can buy, sell, and develop virtual plots of land. You can use the platform to create your own property, monetize it, and do so much more.
Decentraland is a lot like other virtual reality video games, but what makes it different is that it is fully decentralized. That means that unlike traditional social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, people are in control of their own content. People can interact in social VR environments with other users across the globe, and since it is fully decentralized and powered by blockchain, they can open virtual stores, casinos, music concerts, or anything else available in the real world.
Decentraland was founded by Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano in 2015 and launched in 2017. As a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), Decentraland is owned by its users or token holders. The token holders vote on policies within its metaverse.
Decentaland lets you buy LAND, just like NFTs.
The system contains 90,601 virtual plots of LAND, which is in the form of an NFT. Therefore, trading LAND is an NFT transaction. The platform has three native tokens – 1) LAND is an ERC-721 token that represents digital land parcels; 2) Estate is an ERC-721 token that represents merged parcels of digital land; and, 3) MANA is an ERC-20 token that represents Decentraland’s cryptocurrency.
To purchase LAND, users are required to hold $MANA.X in their Ethereum Wallet. They can go to the marketplace – the one-stop shop for avatars, casinos, movie theatres, etc. By buying LAND, $MANA.X is destroyed or exchanged, and this creates a new entry in the registry. At the time of writing, one $MANA.X is trading at $3.3.
Once a plot of land is purchased, it can be used to build an entire virtual city, apartments, parks, or whatever the user desires. With Decentraland’s LAND Estates feature, users can buy multiple plots. This allows users with similar interests to form a community. Users can gain more control of the development of their districts through a voting system called Agora.
Decentraland is a primitive stage of the metaverse.
The popularity of Decentraland skyrocketed after Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta. The social media giant acknowledged the significance of the metaverse, which is the intersection of virtual and augmented reality, as well as online gaming and experiences. Decentraland claimed that it’s already a metaverse platform where users can buy and sell virtual properties, develop their land, and show off digital collectibles.
Last year, Metaverse Group, a subsidiary of Tokens.com, bought a plot of ‘land’ on Decentraland for USD 2.43 million. The purchase was described as a good example of what metaverse will look like in the future.