Decentraland: A Virtual Platform that Users Own

Powered by the Ethereum blockchain, Decentraland is a virtual platform where users can ‘create’, ‘experience’, and ‘monetize content and applications’. The community has the ownership of the ‘land’ in Decentraland. Thus, the users will have complete control over their creations, that is, they have the option to choose what content is to be published. The land belonging to a user is denoted by a set of Cartesian coordinates (x,y). Land by Decentraland has been defined in the whitepaper as “a non-fungible, transferrable, scarce digital asset stored in an Ethereum smart contract. It can be acquired by spending an ERC20 token called MANA.” The token, MANA can also be used to purchase real-world digital services and goods.

As the whitepaper of Decentraland says, no one can single-handedly change the rules of the software or the contents of the land or prevent someone from owning land. Platforms like Facebook have seen a large number of users gathering and sharing content and also playing games. This has also resulted in rapid growth of various online communities and gaming companies. However, these platforms are centralized and the network’s content flow and rules are determined by the organization operating it. The conceptualization of Decentraland started in 2015 and the cryptocurrency was finally released in the market in September 2017. The cryptocurrency world, pioneered by Bitcoin and Ethereum still faces some constraints like the number of network transactions occurring per second, the transaction costs and scalability. “Decentraland is built on the premise that low cost, direct payments between content creators and users will radically change internet commerce.”

An In-world Economy

Decentraland proposes that the platform will be able to capitalize wholly on the financial interactions between the users and applications. For this, Decentraland has to offer currency, goods, and services for trading though. Thus, the system of Decentraland has been designed to allow instant, global and cost-effective transactions between two users on the internet. The developers are also focused on integrating a scripting system that will allow them to program the communications between applications and the users. “This scripting system runs exclusively on the client side but allows for different data flow models: from mere local effects and traditional client-server architectures to P2P interactions based on state channels.” The scripting system benefits the developers due to it cheap micropayments, fast and fair games. The decentralized storage system and other features that involve cryptographic techniques and are based on blockchain smart contracts are also beneficial.

Decentraland Use Cases

• Applications: The scripting language in Decentraland allows the users to develop different applications including online casino games, and dynamic 3D scenes. As per the whitepaper, the scripting language is capable of loading textures, encoding user interactions, creating objects, and handling physics.
• Content: The users, as stated previously, will be able to create content and retain their ownership on the Decentraland platform. The users sharing the same interest areas can form hubs and if someone is located near a high-traffic area, it will also attract other users to their created content.
• Advertising: The Decentraland platform also allows brands to post their advertisements by using billboards near or in high traffic areas such as to attract more clients or customers. The brands can also put up their stories or the ones about shared experiences to engage with the audience. Thus, Decentraland is also a great platform using blockchain technology that can be used in the field of marketing.
• Digital Collectibles: The Decentraland users can publish, distribute and collect different digital assets placed on the blockchain by their creators. They will also be able to trade these digital assets within this channel, similar to the way assets are traded through online forums or other virtual platforms. In this case, it is done through the scripting system.
• Social: The users can form different groups based on their areas of interest. The centralized multi-player games can also join their communities to these groups of Decentraland. The platform also provides this opportunity to the offline communities.

Price Details

As per coinmarketcap.com, Decentraland (MANA) is ranked among the top-100 cryptocurrencies in the world today (93^rd position). The price at the time of writing shows $0.103 USD approximately while the market cap is nearly $108,900,725 USD. The volume (24h) data reads above $10,327,000 USD. (As of 18^th June 208) Till now in this month, the crypto-coin has been experiencing slight fluctuations that are generally observed in the cryptocurrency market.

As such there users are not guided by any technical specifications when it comes to creating an application or a content in Decentraland. Decentraland offers complete freedom to the users regarding this. Education, training and professional development, 3D designs, therapy and virtual tourism are some more examples of use cases of the Decentraland platform. Therefore, based on the proposal of the team of Decentraland, investing in the cryptocurrency or becoming a user has their own benefits.

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Disclaimer: This article should not be taken as, and is not intended to provide, investment advice. Global Coin Report and/or its affiliates, employees, writers, and subcontractors are cryptocurrency investors and from time to time may or may not have holdings in some of the coins or tokens they cover. Please conduct your own thorough research before investing in any cryptocurrency and read our full disclaimer.

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