Ethereum-powered Decentraland opens its doors with $100K giveaway

Decentraland, the long-in-the-works virtual game world in which users can own digital land parcels and create and monetize interactive experiences, finally opened to the public today.

The browser-based, Ethereum blockchain-powered 3D world is now available for anyone to explore and interact with, plus the creators have implemented the final versions of creation and trading tools, such as a drag-and-drop editor, a software development kit, and a marketplace for land and in-game assets.

Decentraland will mark the occasion by giving away more than $100,000 worth of prizes over the next four days via a treasure hunt in its urban hub, Genesis City. The prizes include 1.25 million MANA (ERC-20) tokens, as well as other types of tokens, in-game items, LANDs, and an HTC Exodus 1 smartphone.

As explained in our primer on Decentraland, the company was founded in 2015 and raised $20 million via an ICO in 2017, and LAND parcel tokens have sold for as much as $60,000 apiece. Decentraland is envisioned as a place where LAND owners can create and share their own games and experiences and earn MANA from usage, as well as from renting their LAND to others.

Yesterday, the company announced that it had established a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to handle future policy updates, and that it had recently spread the content of the Decentraland Metaverse across numerous server nodes to eliminate any single point of failure (or kill switch) for the game.