monetize on digital resources in the form of NFTs. However, buying land in the digital world is not cheap, and this is where the idea of metaverse mortgages arose.
What is Decentraland?
Now having established a rudimentary understanding of the Metaverse, it is appropriate to begin exploring some of the prevailing Metaverses in which virtual land is sold. While 2021 has seen the Metaverse grow to become a hot-button topic in the world of crypto and technology at large, there are only a select number of Ethereum-based Metaverses which are responsible for the lion’s share of sales volumes in the virtual land market. These most dominant virtual worlds include:
Decentraland
Arguably the most recognizable of the Metaverses on Ethereum, Decentraland is marketed as a virtual reality platform that allows its community to explore user-generated environments as well as to create, share, and monetize their own content. The platform was founded in 2015 by Esteban Ordano and Ariel Meilich as a proof-of-concept for allocating pixels on a grid among users. This primitive implementation would quickly evolve into the 3D virtual world that it is today. Following the late-2017 Terraform Event, where the first parcels of land were auctioned and distributed to early adopters, the Decentraland platform officially launched for public use in early 2020.
The native cryptocurrency of the Decentraland Metaverse is known as MANA, and it is used to purchase in-world assets and services which include 16x16m parcels of territory aptly referred to as LAND. The total supply of LAND tokens is capped at 90,000. Except for publicly-available infrastructure such as roads and plazas, the entire world of LAND is fully community-owned. To inject the world with a sense of thematic order, certain swathes of LAND are divided into Districts, each of which are formed around specific interests and caters to particular audiences. Further, users can combine adjacent parcels of LAND to form Estates, simplifying the management of real estate holdings and making possible the construction of grand experiences that by necessity, must span multiple parcels of LAND. Landowners have full liberty to use their real estate as they see fit. Generally, it is in the best interests of those who acquire LAND for non-speculative purposes to leverage their holdings as a form of passive income. To enable this, Decentraland offers users the tools needed to build 3D models in their territory and to impose special access privileges on who is permitted to engage with their proprietary experiences. Part of this access control is the ability for content creators to levy admission fees and only authorize paying users to access their content.
Novel and innovative developments have already begun to populate the Decentraland Metaverse or are on the horizon. For instance, pioneering video game company Atari unveiled plans to acquire a large Estate on which they will develop an old-school arcade for users to play time-honoured classics such as Pong and Asteroids directly in Decentraland. Additionally, digital real estate fund Republic Realm has launched developments, including an expansive shopping mall inspired by Tokyo’s iconic Harajuku and an NYSE-modeled trading floor. Other exciting developments include a virtual gallery built by Sotheby’s for exhibiting CryptoArt as well as a 4-
day music festival featuring a lineup which includes Deadmau5 and 3LAU and comes complete with performance venues and VIP areas.
