Decentraland (MANA)

Decentraland

Type	A fungible ERC20 token
Total supply	2,644,403,343 MANA
Website	https://decentraland.org/

Basics

• Their first development milestone was achieved in June 2015 when they developed a simple and pixelated grid.
• Decentraland launched on mainnet on 20-2-2020.
• Based in:
• Decentraland is building a decentralized, blockchain-based virtual world for users to create, experience and monetize content and applications.

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here]. None according to Blockchain Security DB (29-6-2020), which does show 1 audit(7-2017).

Token

Launch

• From Messari (11-2-2020):

"Decentraland completed a token sale on Aug. 18, 2017, after reaching the project’s hard cap and raising 86,260 ether (ETH) worth $25 million at the time. Following the sale, a total of 2.81 billion MANA tokens were created. Participants in the token sale received 40% of total supply (1.12 billion MANA) with a discount system that was scheduled to sell 1,000 MANA at a range of $0.024 to $0.04. Due to a small number of large investors the sale was concluded in only 35 seconds.

The development team, Decentraland Foundation, and a community reserve each received 20% of total supply (561.2 million MANA) with the founder allocation vesting over three years at semi-annual periods.

Additional MANA tokens will be released on an ongoing basis using a continuous token model. In the first year the supply will increase by 8.00% and this rate decreases over time, to 6.06% by year 5 and 4.65% by year 10. These additional tokens will be sold through a smart contract, at a price that can be updated by the Decentraland Foundation to ensure coherence with the market price of MANA. Proceeds will be used to provide ongoing financing for the Foundation.

On Dec. 15, 2017 the Genesis City auction, known as the Terraform Event, sold 90,000 parcels (LAND) in the first area of the platform. Of these, 40,000 were used to create designated community districts based on user proposals. These were priced at 1,000 MANA per LAND. The remaining supply of parcels was auctioned at the same starting rate with the requirement that each bid be 25.00% larger than the last resulting in some parcels selling for 80,000 MANA."

• From Messari (11-2-2020):

"In Dec. 2017, the first LAND tokens representing parcels in the first part of the game, Genesis City, were auctioned off. In March 2018, the Decentraland Marketplace was released allowing users to buy and sell parcels (LAND) in Genesis City as well as explore the area on a map."

Utility

• The MANA token serves (6-11-2021) as the virtual economy’s currency and governance token; 2.5% of MANA in each transaction are burned.

Token Details

• Has two digital assets: LAND, the non-fungible parcels in which the virtual world is divided; and MANA, an ERC-20 token that is burned to claim LAND, as well as to make in-world purchases of goods and services.

LAND

• The amount of LAND is limited. Each plot of LAND is only 33 feet by 33 feet, although there’s no height limit. To give you an idea of how LAND marketplace work, you can check out this web page.
• “The utility of LAND is based on its adjacency to other attention hubs, its ability to host applications, and also as an identity mechanism. Developers and other content creators will demand LAND so that they can build on top of it and reach their target audience.”
• From this explanation article (31-12-2019):

"In the earlier time, the core team sold every plot of LAND for 1000 MANA tokens. Now the price of LAND varies and depending on supply and demand."

• According (30-1-2020) to one Reddit user "In Decentraland, the purchase and sale of property will be tied to real world identity." which insinuates KYC.

Districts

• District land (marked in purple on the map) is not for sale, and owned by private communities with a common theme interest. Districts make up over a third of all LAND available. District leaders run their respective communities. In most cases, they were the people who put the initial proposal forward and wrote the plans for their district.
• More info about Decentraland districts here.

LAND Estates

• From this explanation article (31-12-2019):

"Beside Districts, there’s also LAND Estates. This LAND Estates allows the community to associate directly adjacent parcels of LAND. One important note is that the parcels must be directly connected and must not be separated by any road or plaza or any other parcel."

MANA

• “MANA serves as a proxy to asses the price of a new parcel of LAND. Also, MANA used to buy goods and services in the virtual world creates utility value for the token.”

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: Ethereum and Polygon (2-4-2021).

How it works

• From the whitepaper:

“Decentraland is a distributed platform for a shared virtual world that enables developers to build and monetize applications on top of it. The scarcity of land, on top of which applications can be built, creates hubs that capture user attention, which drives revenue to content creators. MANA tokens will be used to purchase land, goods, and services in-world. MANA tokens will also be used to incentivize content creation and user adoption, therefore bootstrapping the first decentralized virtual world.”

“Decentraland will use an Ethereum smart contract to maintain a ledger of ownership for land parcels in the virtual world. We call these non-fungible digital assets LAND: each LAND has unique (x, y) coordinates, an owner, and a reference to the content description file, which encodes what the landowner wants to serve there. Decentraland clients will connect to the Ethereum network to fetch updates to the state of the LAND smart contract.”

“LAND is bought by burning MANA, a fungible ERC20 token of fixed supply. This token serves as a proxy for the cost of claiming a new parcel. The LAND contract uses  burn function to destroy MANA and create a new entry in the LAND registry. New parcels need to be adjacent to a non-empty parcel.”

• A further explanation can be read here (12-2019).

• From this explanation article (31-12-2019):

"The protocol of Decentraland involves three different layers. The first layer is called the Consensus layer, where it tracks land ownership and the content through the smart contract.

The second layer is called the Land content layer, where it utilizes a decentralized system to render and distribute content to the world of Decentraland. And lastly, we have Real-time layer, where it gives peer-to-peer connections for the community to interact."

• From Messari (11-2-2020):

"The base of the network rests on the consensus layer, where land ownership is established through the LAND smart contract and token system. Each LAND entry also contains a has that references the file containing the details of each parcel of land.

Files related to LAND entries are contained in the content layer which stores specific details of a land parcel, such descriptions of objects, textures, sounds, as well as scripts controlling how the content is placed and behaves in the parcel. Additional details such as scripts for user interaction and a link to servers for peer-to-peer interactions can be stored in these files. The platform uses IPFS network to store data and links in the consensus layer to retrieve it.

Users will interact with objects and other participants in the virtual world through the real-time layer. All interactions on this layer will be handled through peer-to-peer connections, with servers hosted by landowners or third-parties, removing the need to rely on centralized server."

Governance

• On their website they have an Agora (11-2-2020) in which polls are held and can be voted with MANA. The poll with the most MANA and highest amount of voters (26-1-2020) was about how much 1 LAND should equal in MANA. 41,108,972.57 MANA was voted with by 75 voters.

DAO

• This Agora voted overwhelmingly, 98.8% with a total of 33 votes, for Aragon as the DAO implementation (The other option was: "using another DAO system", not a very attractive other choice of course).
• Is establishing (11-12-2019) a DAO:

"Establishing a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to determine all future LAND updates, including contract upgrades, supply expansions, dates of future auctions to accommodate said supply expansions, LAND marketplace fees for primary and secondary sales, management of abandoned or relinquished LANDs and more."

However, they also have a 'Security Advisory Board'

"However, there’s more to owning LAND upgrades than just adding more functionality. Sometimes (though hopefully never), it will be necessary to do an emergency upgrade of the LAND contract to fix a bug. For example, let’s say there was a bug in a contract that allowed someone to steal LAND from another user. If we were to create a vote on the Decentraland DAO to solve the issue and someone detects that the only change is a bug fix it would be like pointing out how to exploit the bug to continue stealing LAND.

Aside from the DAO, we think there should be a group of people tasked with preventing and handling security issues on LAND and Estate contracts. This group of people, which we’re calling the Security Advisory Board, will effectively act as guarantors of contract security, tasked with the job of providing swift response to bug reports.

The Security Advisory Board will be able to quickly upgrade the smart contract implementation of the LAND and Estate contracts, and replace it with a bug-free version upon receiving a responsible disclosure bug report. Responsible disclosures follow this protocol."

How the Security Advisory Board works

All contract updates must be unanimous, so the multisig governing updates will require at least three signatories, with no votes against, in order to upgrade the LAND.

The Board will comprise several expert entities or individuals initially chosen by the Decentraland team. Members can be changed by the Aragon DAO—a vote must be started to remove or install a new member."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Usage

• Has around 500 users (6-10-2022).
• The average price of Decentraland property listed on OpenSea is 5.91ETH as of 2-2020. Pretty high.
• According to a Reddit user (1-2020):

"You don't need to own land to enter the world. You can get free land to use from the Anarchist international district and also the coming Land Sharing Pool.

Original plan is that all mana can be converted into land. it will happen later when new land auction happens. More land will come into existence once the world fills with content. They just didn't want to produce more land and have empty world syndrome, they are waiting until things are running smooth and the world gets full of content. this is a top secret elite rumor"

Projects that use or built on it

• Atari; is joining Decentraland (22-1-2021).

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Had $55M parked at Genesis at the time of collapse, twice the amount of what the Decentraland treasury holds, so unclear what the real deal is (20-1-2023).

Team, Partners, etc.

Team

• Meilich, Ari; Project Lead
• Esteban Ordano; Technical Lead

Advisors

• Araoz, Manuel, advisor (CTO at Zeppelin Solutions)
• Li, Xiaolai; advisor
• Brukhman, Jake; advisor
• Cuende, Luis; advisor
• Doval, Diego; advisor
• Jardi, Yemel; Advisor

On Messari there is only (11-2-2020) one advisor mentioned: Giotto De Filippi

Partners

• Partners with: District0x, Aragon, Zeppelin Solutions, imToken
• 'Launch Partners' with (11-2-2020); Dapper, Binance, Trust Wallet, MyCryptoHeroes, Crypto.com, Matic, Huobi, Dapp.com, imToken and Coinbase Wallet.

Funding

• Had funding (2-2023) of Yat Siu (from Animoca Brands).
• Full list can be found here on Messari (11-2-2020).