Decentraland (MANA) is a blockchain and metaverse platform, which allows users to purchase virtual land and participate in a unique virtual community, which seeks to create a unique virtual experience.
The Decentraland (MANA) project is the clearest demonstration that the world of blockchain technology has evolved a lot in recent years. An evolution that has brought this technology to the world of games and virtual worlds.
Decentraland is a project that runs on the Ethereum (ETH) blockchain and whose purpose is the creation of an open virtual world in which its users can operate just as they do in the physical world. This means that they can socialize, explore and trade in said virtual world, thanks to blockchain technology, with which they can create unique avatars of themselves, make peer-to-peer purchases and payments.
The idea for the creation of Decentraland was formed in the minds of Esteban Ordano and Ariel Meilich in 2015, although the project required two years of development. Between August 16 and 18, 2017, an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) was held, raising initial funding of 86,206 ethers (about $26 million at the time) in exchange for MANA tokens, the main token from Decentraland. All this money was managed by the Decentraland Foundation, created with the purpose of promoting the development of the platform, for which it retained 20% of the initial token offering, the intellectual property rights and the Decentraland website.
With the ICO, Decentraland also launched the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) to hand over project management to its users. In this way, it was made clear that the system worked completely autonomously.
Now, in order to make Decentraland work correctly, the development team has created a structure that is divided into three parts:
Consensus Layer: On which falls the responsibility of tracking all operations of ownership of the game. For example, if a player has created an identity and purchased a virtual piece of land within Decentraland, this layer will create the corresponding blockchain record of such actions.
Content layer: This layer has the purpose of storing the information that will be used for the rendering of the content in the virtual world. The idea is that each user has in his possession a small part (or all) of the data to be rendered, keeping the system as efficient as possible.
Real-time interaction layer: This layer is the one that allows the interaction of users in real time within the platform
Another important point in the operation of Decentraland is that this project has two well-defined functioning tokens.
The first is the MANA token, which was created as a governance token within the platform and for the purchase and sale of land within it. That is, MANA token holders can participate in the governance of the protocol and can acquire virtual land lots within Decentraland.
This token was created following the Ethereum ERC-20 standard, so it can be easily integrated into DeFi platforms, DEXes, and other Ethereum dApps, allowing rapid exchange of it.
Furthermore, Decentraland decided that the existence of MANA tokens would be limited to a total of 2,194,460,527 tokens. The idea of capping MANA tokens is to make them more valuable as usage of the platform increases.
The second token is LAND, a non-fungible token that follows the ERC-721 standard. Each LAND token uniquely identifies the properties of a parcel of land that is owned by a Decentraland user. For example, each piece of land has its unique characteristics, and therefore each LAND token represents all those properties. In order to acquire LAND tokens, the user must exchange their MANA tokens for LAND tokens, an action that burns the MANA tokens, making them more scarce and valuable.
Due to LAND's relationship with MANA, the existence of this token is also limited, and its creation responds to the smart contracts that participate in the internal exchange of MANA for LAND. Also, when you are holding two LAND tokens together (two adjacent parcels) then you are holding an Estate token, this type of token is important because both MANA, LAND and Estate tokens can be used in Decentraland governance.