Virtual reality….

Cryptocurrencies….

Decentralization….

SO MANY BUZZWORDS...but so impractical.

This leads us to today’s review: Decentraland.

Let’s dig in….

Decentraland (ticker: MANA)

Mid-Tier Shitcoin (not sure how)

Wtf is this shit?

Decentraland is a virtual reality ‘world’ where users can buy LAND (plots of ‘land’ in the VR world). Each piece of LAND is non-fungible and purchased with their MANA token (an ERC-20 token). When LAND is purchased, the MANA used to buy it is burned. MANA is also the token used to make in-world purchases. You can spin up casinos, stores, or virtually anything you can imagine.

Districts can be formed..which are essentially neighborhoods of similar content (say...casinos...think Las Vegas or Atlantic City).

According to the white paper, Decentraland's architecture include three main layers: the consensus layer, land content layer, and the real-time layer.

The consensus layer tracks land and ownership of content through its Ethereum smart contract. Land ownership is referenced through a hash of the file’s content. Each piece of land is tracked through basic x,y coordinates.

The land content layer allows users to download content (explore) through a decentralized distribution system.

Lastly, the real-time layer allows users to connect and interact with each other...rendering near real-time.

So..basically there is the consensus layer which identifies and tracks the requested land content (referenced through a hash of the file’s content).

Using this reference, the content can be downloaded via BitTorrent or IPFS..this is the land content layer.

This downloaded file contains images, sounds, textures, 3D meshes, and other data about the land content. It also contains the ‘URL of a rendezvous server’ which is fancy jargon for how users are connected together….this is the real-time layer.

Who tf is behind this shit?

They have two team leads: Ari Meilich as the project lead and Esteban Ordano as the tech lead. Ari seems fairly young (finishing undergrad in 2013 it seems..and a background in marketing and business...although he studied the sciences in school. Esteban seem to have good experience...he was previously a software engineer at BitPay.

All in all...interesting idea, but we are skeptical on the practicality...and not sure how it sits at #75 on Coinmarketcap at the time of this writing. VR (like cryptocurrency) is still in its infancy, and BOTH together? They're going to need a lot of VR devs to build experiences in this 'world' and even more VR users to consume it...seems impractical. Still, we wish them luck.

Hope you learned some shit.

Chat soon!

- Mike and Aaron