Decentraland: New Open Standards-Based Virtual World Uses Blockchain to Track Content Ownership & IPFS to Distribute Content

Decentraland is a new virtual world which aims to run completely on open standards technology and protocols. I'm not familiar with the creators, but to judge by the trailer (above) they have hella high ambition. More from the site:

Decentraland uses the Ethereum blockchain to store information about land ownership and its content. The Ethereum smart contract validates that modifications were made by the owner of the land. Users can use MANA to buy any empty land parcel.

Some of the graphics effects are pretty impressive though the avatars seem to be from 2007. Another ambitious aspect to Decentraland is it'll distribute content via the IPFS protocol, an equally audacious technology I first heard about from my colleague Amber Case:

The InterPlanetary File System — a tribute to J.C.R. Licklider’s vision for an “intergalactic” Internet — is the brainchild of Juan Benet, who moved to the U.S. from Mexico as a teen, earned a computer science degree at Stanford, started a company acquired by Yahoo! in 2013 and, last year at Y Combinator, founded Protocol Labs, which now drives the IPFS project and its modest aim of replacing protocols that have seemed like facts of life for the last 20 years.

As a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files, IPFS seeks to improve on HTTP in several ways. Two, Juan told me in a recent conversation, are key:

“We use content-addressing so content can be decoupled from origin servers, and instead, can be stored permanently. This means content can be stored and served very close to the user, perhaps even from a computer in the same room. Content-addressing allows us to verify the data too, because other hosts may be untrusted. And once the user’s device has the content, it can be cached indefinitely.”

IPFS also addresses security problems that plague our HTTP-based Internet: Content-addressing and content-signing protect IPFS-based sites, making DDoS attacks impossible. And to help mitigate the damage of discontinued websites, IPFS also archives important public-record content, and can easily store important, public-record content.

More about IPFS here. Impressive approach, to be sure; hopefully the developers put as much effort into Decentraland's consumer appeal as its backend technology.

Thanks to  Dulce Baerga for the tip!

Comments

[Joe Guy]

These guys want $100 to get in the door. Not gonna work.