Decentraland (MANA)

WHAT IS DECENTRALAND?

Decentraland is an immersive virtual reality gaming platform where users can interact in spaces called Land parcels that can be brought through NFT marketplaces. Land owners can use the plots to their will by building structures, hosting events, creating games and offering services like education, tourism, etc.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Each Land is 33 feet by 33 feet in size with no height limits. The Lands are assigned to Districts, with each district dedicated to a particular service. Users can buy Lands in multiple districts which can then be managed simultaneously using the platform’s Land Estates feature.

Decentraland allows users to vote on issues regarding their districts through the platform’s DApp, Agora. The amount of Land a user owns in a district correlates to the weight of their vote. The platform is completely owned by its users under a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

Decentraland’s ledger keeps a record of every Land parcel and tracks its ownership using smart contracts. Each parcel of Land has a unique coordinate in the metaverse, an owner and a description file describing the contents within the Land.

ARCHITECTURE

Users can create their virtual world models on design softwares such as SketchUp and Blender, then import the designs onto the platform’s marketplace.

1.Decentraland’s protocol has three layers:

Consensus Layer

Tracks land ownership and land content via an Ethereum smart contract

2.Land Content Layer

Uses a decentralized distribution system to render the contents in the lands

3.Real-time layer

Provides P2P connections for users to interact with each other using avatars via voice chat and messaging.

MANA

MANA is the Decentraland’s governance token. The ERC-20 token is used to purchase Lands and goods and services on the metaverse.

When a Land is bought, the platform burns the corresponding MANA tokens used to purchase the plot. Initially Lands were sold for 1,000 MANA, as the popularity and demand for Decentraland went up, the price of plots increased. At the time of writing, the floor price of a Land is 11,750 MANA while Lands in popular districts are valued in millions.

HOW TO BUY AND STORE MANA?

MANA tokens can be purchased using BTC and ETH on major cryptocurrency exchanges. The purchased tokens can then be transferred to the user’s preferred crypto wallets.