If you follow the world of cryptocurrencies and NFTsyou’ve probably heard of it before, but for everyone else this question has popped into their heads or is about to do so soon: what is Decentraland?
Decentraland is a project born in 2015but which only came to maturity a couple of years ago when it was officially made available to the public.
Simply put, it is a virtual world in which people or companies can buy spaces and objects to develop the most disparate experiences. So it is what today we would call a metaverse and that a few years ago we would have defined “Something like Second Life”Or even ad Habbo, if you are children of the 90s. Since then, many things have changed, both in terms of computing power and network infrastructure and, above all, blockchain technologies have developed.
The spaces inside Decentraland can represent everything that the developers decide to create: museums, shops, squares in which to discuss with other people, stands for the presentation of products (the same Samsung unveiled the latest smartphones there) and playful experiences of all kinds, from first-person shooters to driving games, passing through clones of Minecraft O World of Warcraft. The suffix -craft, which in English can mean art or craft (but also the very act of creating or assembling something), is in fact the very soul of the project.
Decentraland is not an innovative product: virtual spaces of this type have been around for some time theorized by science fiction and cyberpunk and they have become real projects like the one already mentioned Second Life. But as is often the case when faced with a technological leap, it incorporates many ideas from the past to blend them into something that has the potential to become greater than the sum of its parts.
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How Decentraland works
The world of Decentraland is divided into Parcel, parcels of land of 16 square meters that everyone can buy and combine with adjacent ones to create a space large enough to accomplish what they have in mind. Furthermore, for some of these spaces there is a graphic design or a specific theme that places them within a specific district, a bit like what happens in amusement parks, or how it happened. many years ago within Geocities, where all the sites that talked about cinema were contained in the same directory. The first example of this organization is Genesis Plaza, a virtual square that is located in the center of the map and where you can learn more about all of Decentraland, how to use it and which are the most fashionable areas.
Each Parcel is associated with an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, therefore it is unique, not replicable and cannot be confused with the others. It contains the coordinates that place the plots of virtual land on the map and all the information necessary to visualize it in space.
The paradigm shift of Decentraland and similar projects, according to its creators, is that unlike other virtual spaces owned by a single body, there cannot be total control over the content by a central body that censors and bans. In fact, the whole thing would be managed by a Dao, a Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which would allow a collective management of Decentraland and would guarantee all participants the possibility of voting for any expansions or improvements. The problem is that voting capacity is directly linked to how much has been invested. The Dao also controls smart contracts most important, i.e. blockchain information related to leases, objects within Decentraland and so on.
A world regulated by virtual currency
The virtual currency with which to shop in Decentraland it’s called Mana, it started circulating in 2018 after an initial sales offer that raised $ 26 million in about 30 seconds.
At the moment every Mana is worth around 2.80 euros and the price of a Parcel can vary from 1000 to much, much more: it depends, as in the real estate market, where it is located. Once you have purchased a piece of virtual land, you can decide to decorate it using the internal editor, create customized virtual objects or buy those created by others.
The problem, beyond the enthusiasm of cryptocurrency lovers, is that Decentraland today seems like yet another bet in which it is very risky to participate, especially because there is nothing really attractive about itnothing that has not already been seen and nothing that suggests a possible explosion of the phenomenon, if not temporary.
Moving between the various areas of Decentraland, one does not have the impression of being faced with a new communication paradigm, but at the most of a set of outdated ideas that come back to be seen thanks to new infrastructures but which retain the same charm as when on Second Life you were in front of a nightcluba square, the pulpit from which Di Pietro made a speech when the image of IDV was managed by Casaleggio Associati.
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Like a half-empty shopping mall
There is undoubtedly a certain charm in the idea of moving in these spaces, which can represent places of aggregation, marketing and even buying, but beyond the fact that at the moment in Decentraland everything is very sketchy, the alleged freedom and flexibility given by the Dao and its forms of self-government does not seem to have brought much benefit. A few examples? Wired reports that many users own e they show NFT with racial offenses and insults of all kindsthat the quorum was not reached to ensure that it was not possible to call oneself Hitler and that the tools for moderating and blocking any annoying users are not yet absolutely defined as they should be, in a space that tries to sell itself as an alternative reality full of brands of all kinds.
Decentraland, like many other speculations, only seems to work as long as the initial investment of some convinces enough people to invest in turn, in search of an easy income, in the next NFT monkey that will make someone millions because Justin Bieber bought his. However, there is an underlying problem: at the moment Decentraland is a cathedral in the deserta space built with millions of dollars and which today hosts about 2 thousand people.
We are therefore talking about a sort of half-empty shopping center, especially compared to the numbers of phenomena like Roblox, in which a handful of people wandering surrounded by brands who have decided to be there for fear of missing out on the next next-big-thing, like when every company had to have a site, even if it didn’t know what to do with it. On the other hand, not all of them blockchain lovers seem to be able to understand what they can actually do with what they buy e the word metaverse is now used a bit for everything.
Of course, many ideas that are millionaires today started quietly and with very little credit and the Internet itself was a fad for some, but the few ideas that work risk making us forget the many that didn’t make it. Perhaps Decentraland will one day be the place where we will all come together to live our experiences in the metaverse, perhaps it will be one of its competitors, since there are so many similar projects that sooner or later will be reduced. when the fashion is over, but today, more than a winning idea, it seems like yet another attempt to sell the Trevi Fountain to an inexperienced tourist. However, if there are those who have spent 120 thousand dollars to buy Rome on a similar project (Ertha), there is probably room for Decentraland as well.