What is Decentraland?
Welcome to Decentraland, a magical virtual world where literally anything is possible! In this digital universe, you can explore a vast and stunning landscape, create your own unique avatar, and interact with other users from around the globe.
Decentraland has been pioneering the decentralized metaverse long before the recent push from tech giants like Facebook's Meta. While Meta has been grabbing headlines with its vision of a fully-realized virtual world, Decentraland has already been offering users an immersive and decentralized experience for several years.
The story of Decentraland starts in 2015, when two engineers came up with the idea of a decentralized virtual world. In 2017, Decentraland held its ICO and raised 86,206 ETH (about $26M at the time) to fund its future operations. All plots of LAND available at the time were sold out within seconds, proving that the crypto community cared about metaverse before it became a buzzword.
The idea isn't new and Decentraland isn't the only project building its own metaverse. Long standing projects like Roblox and Minecraft have implemented the idea of an open world where players are free to explore and trade items. There is one problem though, none of these games guarantee digital property.
For example, items in Minecraft are siloed in the game, with no possibility to trade them outside the game. If that wasn't compelling enough, Windows (the company that acquired Minecraft) can nerf items and brick the game altogether if they want to.
Decentraland is decentralized from the top to the bottom. Meaning users truly own their virtual items and no one can take them away. Furthermore, Decentraland is open-source, which invites participation from the wider community.
Decentraland offers several guarantees that users retain ownership of their items and there's no "killswitch" to the metaverse.
First off, everything you can find inside the virtual world of Decentraland is hosted on a distributed network of servers. Files are stored in a decentralized file system resembling IPFS, and automatically synchronized across content servers. One key aspect to the resilience of the files is that they are immutable. Once deployed, their contents change.
The File Storage caters to the content creators on Decentraland. The team offers a streamlined way for creators to upload their items to the File Storage and have them stored forever. There will always be a copy of the Files available to download by anyone. The distributed file storage makes Decentraland resilient against attempts to erase the metaverse.
Even before Decentraland launched, the team created a DAO to turn the management of the project over to its users. The Decentraland DAO owns the most important smart contracts and assets that make up Decentraland – the LAND Contract, the Estates Contract, Wearables, Content Servers and the Marketplace. It also owns a substantial stash of MANA which allows it to be truly autonomous.
According to the team, the MANA token is fully decentralized, in the sense that the private key that controlled its smart contract has been thrown away. This leaves MANA out of the team's reach, or anyone's.
Maintaining a $1B metaverse requires experienced engineers and a lot of resources. For this reason, Decentraland is supervised by a Security Council that is elected by the MANA token holders. In its exiting governance format, Decentraland has never been hacked.
How does Decentraland work?
Decentraland is a decentralized virtual world that runs on the Ethereum network. In this digital world, users can own, create, and trade unique digital assets. Decentraland offers an open-world experience where users can build and create digital economies from the ground up.
Items on Decentralized come in the form of NFTs. Because NFTs are stored on a blockchain, ownership can be easily transferred and recorded without the need for a centralized authority. In other words, NFTs represent the purest form of property in the metaverse.
Virtual LAND
Land parcels on Decentraland are NFTs. Each parcel of LAND has a unique coordinate in the virtual world, an owner and a reference to a description file representing the content within the parcel.
Land parcels are 16m x 16m, or 52ft x 52ft. These limits have been capped by the community based on the limitations of Decentraland. The number of LAND parcels is also limited at 90,601. The rationale is that users will be incentivized to build on every parcel instead of leaving huge areas of wasteland. The limited number of parcels also makes them more valuable.
How to make money on Decentraland?
Making money on Decentraland is tied to the amount of value that you can create. For example, users start creating wearables and sell them on Decentraland. New protocols launch their hub on Decentraland, offering visitor rewards.
Another way is to rent your LAND to others. Just like in real estate business, land parcels on Decentraland can be lent, resulting in a source of passive income.
Overall, the ways of making money on Decentraland are limited by one's imagination. If you want to become part o the Decentraland economy, we recommend joining Decentraland guilds.
Price Prediction for LAND: Can it hit $1000?
Buying and hodling MANA — the native token of Decentraland — is one way of potentially making money on Decentraland.
By looking at its current price, it’s natural to think about the chance of MANA hitting $1000 per token. This can happen sooner, or way in the future, and is determined by a couple of ever changing factors.
Let’s examine the potential growth of the MANA token by analyzing its tokenomics. MANA’s current market cap sits comfortably at ${MARKET_CAP}. With {CIRCULATING_SUPPLY} MANA tokens being in circulation today, that means a price of {PRICE} per MANA.
How did we come to that calculation? It’s quite easy, the price of a MANA token is equal to its current market cap divided by the number of tokens in circulation. Dividing ${MARKET_CAP} by {CIRCULATING_SUPPLY} gives us a result of {PRICE} for each MANA coin.
By changing the order in the simple formula above we can use it to calculate other things as well. This helps us a lot because we can deduce the market cap of MANA at different token prices. Then, we can use the result to compare it to the current state of the network and see what would be required for MANA to hit that price.
At a price of $1000 per token, that means the current market cap of MANA would equal ${{CIRCULATING_SUPPLY} * 1000}. Remember that we arrived at this number by multiplying the amount of circulating tokens by $1000.
Now let’s shift our attention to the fully diluted market cap.
Some blockchains may have their tokenomics built in a way that only a small percentage of tokens are circulating at the beginning. This can be misleading because we don’t have the full picture and only take into account the current number of coins released in the market.
The fully diluted market cap represents the total value of a coin if all tokens were in circulation. MANA’s whole supply of tokens is {MAX_SUPPLY - TOTAL_SUPPLY + CIRCULATING_SUPPLY} MANA which means that no more coins above that number will ever be created.
These tokens are not created at the discretion of a specific entity. They are created automatically by the network to reward different actors that keep it secure.
How does this impact the price of MANA? Taking into account the current price of a MANA token, that would result in a fully diluted market cap of ${MAX_SUPPLY - TOTAL_SUPPLY + CIRCULATING_SUPPLY * PRICE}. MANA coins that have been burned are not taken into consideration because they have been permanently removed from circulation.
Whether it seems gigantic or not, the number we came to above only takes into account the current price of a MANA token. Doing the same calculation but with a price of $1000 gives us a result of ${{MAX_SUPPLY - TOTAL_SUPPLY + CIRCULATING_SUPPLY} * 1000} for the MANA protocol fully diluted market cap.
These are all crucial details to know when calculating if MANA can reach the price of $1000 per token. If the diluted market capitalization is way too high, the token has little room left to grow. Blockchains in general have no cap on the value they can reach, whether that number seems possible it’s totally up to you.
The future of MANA depends solely on its growth as a network used by tens and hundreds of millions of users.
If you’re looking to add some MANA to your portfolio, the most trusted places to get some are Binance and Coinbase.