Decentraland Instantly Sells Virtual Land Plots Worth USD $25 Million in Ethereum to Fund Development of Open Standards Social VR Platform

Decentraland, the ambitious, open standards-based social VR world project which uses blockchain to track content ownership, just had a sale of virtual land plots in exchange for Ethereum today (1000 square feet for the ETH equivalent of $24 USD), and it went surprisingly well: In terms of US dollars, the company sold $25 million worth of virtual land instantaneously.

“[The sale] lasted a few seconds,” Decentraland’s Ari Meilich tells me. “It's hard to estimate the total size until we look into it closer, and yes, people bought some big lots, but it'll be resold in the exchanges and we'll get wider distribution.”

These purchases, says Meilich, will be used to fund the production of Decentraland, which is still in prototype phase:

“[It] will finance the development of the protocol, the tools and services that developers will use to build on top of Decentraland, the overall operations, and also will help us build a sizeable pool to bootstrap the network. To beat the chicken-and-egg problem of every nascent network, we're reserving both funds and MANA tokens [Decentraland’s currency] to incentivize developers to join while the number of users (the ‘network utility’) is low. Our token-based model incentivizes early contributors, since they get in at a cheaper price and benefit from growing the network.”

During the test demo, in fact, the prototype was shut down during the token sale for security reasons. “We're being heavily targeted by hackers due to our sale.” But Meilich argues that Decentraland’s core architecture will make users safer from hackers and other bad actors overall:

“[T]hey literally OWN the land, unlike in centralized virtual worlds, so there's no entity, not even ourselves, who can take away ownership, modify their content or suddenly decide that their content is not theirs anymore. That's the power of the blockchain and decentralization… People are used to having their virtual worlds created by a company. In our case it's an open community that builds collaboratively. We just closed our Slack through the end of the token launch to safeguard our community, but those who have doubts or fears should drop by and chat with the crowd. “

Comments

[Zante]

In actual fact, the community is in uproar over how this was handled.

[Just Say'n]

@Zante

Forums offline and any other comment sections cleverly hidden to suppress any talk..LOL

Uproar seems to be how they allowed whales to grab everything in seconds, likely them and the whales working together?

Decentraland could be something big, but only time will tell,for the most part more innovative and out of the box thinking then Sansar might ever be, but on the other hand they might not have the business ethics the lab has adapted since Ebbe came to town as the backers and developers of Decentraland seem somewhat shady.

[Zante]

Well, I've written a small piece on it. I've linked back to this article.
http://www.virtualautonomy.com/site/2017/08/18/blockchain-based-virtual-world-decentraland-left-community-uproar/

[Just Say'n]

@ At Zante

Myself finding the whole virtual coin thing only those with big pockets can really get into as this is a fine example of risk to come with this technology

Decentraland does have competition to think about trying? https://looq.io/ or could it be the same people pretending to be someone else? 3 of the developer profile pictures was extensively photoshopped with one it seems they turned 6 people into one person cropping in certain face features and areas to create 1 face

Seems some shocking info to the unaware.. some juicy copy/pasta nuggets=)

https://twitter.com/ira_bailey/status/898300688890863616

https://www.reddit.com/r/decentraland/comments/6uezj7/this_ico_is_exactly_why_the_sec_is_firing_warning/

""Look at the series of events.

They hyped and pumped and set the date.
They disabled realtime communications in Slack.
They stopped answering questions on Reddit and Twitter.
They changed the Terms at the last minute.
They forced everyone to download a closed source wallet plugin by not providing all the gas\data details.
They used a scheme with ZERO whale protection.
They suddenly upped the limit by 5 million at the last minute.
The blockchain shows early large purchases.
The blockchain shows over 6000 small purchases denied.
Happy twitter message, and poof they are gone.

This was a planned inside job, or they are completely incompetent. The most obvious answer is they sold it all to themselves and friends, and screwed the "community" over bigtime the first chance they got.

The biggest insult is -> By not releasing the fully explained GAS and DATA requirements, they forced any non-experienced people to use an unsecure closed source wallet plugin. Since this looked sketchy as hell, over 6000 people tried manually and lost their gas transaction charges. Ripped you off twice.

There is zero reason to believe any of the future plans now. I am out."

http://www.doubtreality.com/blog/decentraland

On the morning of August 17th, 2017, the ~3500 poeple who were a part of Decentraland community woke up excited. It was finally the day of the Decentraland ICO, or Initial Coin Offering. This was ultimately the first oppurtunity for the community to make their stake in the wild west of the virtual world.

Decentraland’s community was very unique. Unlike most other projects these days, the community around it was almost completely centralized, in a Slack channel controlled by the Decentraland team. It was one universal forum where everyone could talk to their future neighbors, business partners, and the creators of the virtual world themselves. About two hours before the ICO, the Decentraland team archived and locked all the channels except two that they control, #announcements and #dev-updates. This was very strange, they’d never told us they were going to do that before this point. It was very disconcerting not to be able to talk with our fellow community members while we approached the moment we’d all been waiting for.

Despite this, everyone was still excited to buy in. The community had a huge amount of optimism in the project and a lot of love and trust for the development team. Because of that, the community wanted to put their money where their mouths were to prove they were invested in Decentraland’s long-term success. This was important because of what Decentraland is. It’s a fully decentralized virtual world. It was important because none of it had any inherent value. Decentraland, and it’s cryptocurrency MANA, was only as valuable as people made it. But within the first 10 seconds of it’s coins existence, the value to it’s community tanked.

5 large investors, known as “whales”, were able to buy in early to the ICO. Though many of the details are unkown(one whale seems to be a known smart-contract pool), it looks like collusion with the creators of Decentraland, as one 10,000ETH(~$3,000,000) purchase was allowed to occur 3 hours before the start of the ICO(a partnership with an app, apparently).

Thus, a small handful of MANA-holders (last time I checked it was up to nine from five) took full control of Decentraland. Meaning 99.7% of Decentraland’s community had absolutely no stake in Decentraland.

So immediately, we got to work. We made a Slack channel to discuss our plans, here:

https://join.slack.com/t/decentralandemigrants/shared_invite/MjI4MTkxMTE2MjkxLTE1MDMwMDg2MDQtMDY0NThhYjEzMw

It was clear that we didn’t want to buy in to a project that was controlled by a select few, after being stabbed in the back by the team we trusted.

Currently, people are discussing ways to take power back from Decentraland. This includes things like hashtag campaign’s(#decentraland #boycottmana), identifying issues with Decentraland, and presenting proposals for what to do going forward.

We’re a small splinter community, but we’re working hard and fast moving forward. In less than 24 hours we’ve had hundreds of contributions from dozens of users. I presented a proposal to the #dev channel, and we’re doing our first survey to design the democratic process of a decentralized metaverse.

But this isn’t about the Decentraland Emigrants, it’s about Decentraland itself. There was a HUGE amount of red flags, but no one took them seriously. People were cluelessly optimistic. This included:

No one on the Decentraland team had any game dev or VR experience, despite claiming to be building a VRMMO
The project claimed to have started in June 2015, but had no notable releases or product development until March 2017
The ICO was delayed
The team arbitrarily planned an ICO whitelist pre-sale and discount within a few weeks of the ICO, after repeatedly claiming pre-sales were bad
Cancelling said whitelist pre-sale just days before the ICO
The team refused to create any sort of protections on huge individual purchases
The source code to the Unity browser of Decentraland was very unimpressive
There has been no VR-specific development done for Decentraland at all to this day
The team refused to package an executable of the Decentraland browser for the community
The Decentraland team claimed that they were trashing the Unity Web Player version for Aframe and WebVR, even though they have no experience with aframe and have no aframe product to show

So with all these red flags, why didn’t I warn people? Two fundamental reasons, firstly, the Decentraland community was so optimistic and positive, that they reacted badly to people asking critical questions on the community Slack channel.

Secondly, I wanted to make money. Spending my time and energy to warn people would make them less likely to buy in. So instead, I prepared to buy in to the ICO weeks in advance, and planned on releasing a bunch of content to increase awareness around Decentraland(and help solve all of the complaints I had with the project) after I’d bought in. In fact, hundreds of people were planning on doing the same thing. Instead, most of those people have already left the Decentraland community. As far as they’re concerned, it was a scam.

And it’s a damn shame, because this was the closest thing to an open metaverse we’ve ever gotten.

[Han Held]

@Just Say'n
"Forums offline and any other comment sections cleverly hidden to suppress any talk..LOL

Uproar seems to be how they allowed whales to grab everything in seconds, likely them and the whales working together?"

If this had been Open Source, instead of Open Standards, folks could have forked it and whales would be a non-issue.

...just sayin... ;)

[Just Say'n]

@ Zante

I forgot to mention a very interesting blog you got, I made sure to subscribe :)