Decentraland is a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications. Land in Decentraland is permanently owned by the community, giving them full control over their creations. Users claim ownership of virtual land on a blockchain-based ledger of parcels. Landowners control what content is published to their portion of land, which is identified by a set of cartesian coordinates (x,y). Contents can range from static 3D scenes to interactive systems such as games.
Decentraland is a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Users can create, experience, and monetize content and applications.
Decentraland’s ownership of land is one kind of identity system, where credentials are the coordinates of one’s land. Economic incentives are also necessary to ensure that the creators of avatars, items, and scripts continue building and distributing them. Since content can be arbitrarily copied, we must rely in social agreements to enforce retribution to the creator. Social agreements can make digital scarcity possible. In centralized systems, this scarcity is defended by the company that creates the platform. For Bitcoin and other proof-of-work blockchains, scarcity is enabled by a computational puzzle and the fact that mining blocks requires an onerous economic sacrifice.
Clients will communicate with each other by establishing peer-to-peer connections with the help of servers hosted by landowners or third parties. Without a centralized server, peer-to-peer connections are needed to provide social interactions between users, as well as applications that the landowner wants to run inside the parcel. To coordinate the bootstrap of peer-to-peer connections, landowners will have to provide rendezvous servers or understand that users will not be able to see each other in their parcel. The maintenance of these servers can be incentivized the same way as content servers. When lightweight protocols like STUN13 can cover the functionality required from the server, the costs would be fairly low. But for more advanced features, such as a voice chat between multiple concurrent users or network traversal services, micropayments can be used to cover the operating costs.
Decentraland uses a decentralized storage system to distribute the content needed to render the world. For each parcel that needs to be rendered, a reference to a file with the description of the parcel’s content is retrieved from the smart contract. The current solution uses the battle-tested BitTorrent and Kademlia DHT networks by storing a magnet link for each parcel. However, the Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS)11 provides a compelling alternative as its technology matures. This decentralized distribution system allows Decentraland to work without the need of any centralized server infrastructure. This allows the world to exist as long as it has users distributing content, shifting the cost of running the system to the same actors that benefit from it. It also provides Decentraland with strong censorship-resistance, eliminating the power of a central authority to change the rules or prevent users from participating.
Decentraland will use an Ethereum smart contract to maintain a ledger of ownership for land parcels in the virtual world. We call these non-fungible digital assets LAND: each LAND has unique (x, y) coordinates, an owner, and a reference to the content description file, which encodes what the landowner wants to serve there. Decentraland clients will connect to the Ethereum network to fetch updates to the state of the LAND smart contract. LAND is bought by burning MANA, a fungible ERC20 token of fixed supply. This token serves as a proxy for the cost of claiming a new parcel. The LAND contract uses a burn function to destroy MANA and create a new entry in the LAND registry. New parcels need to be adjacent to a non-empty parcel.
Land ownership is established at the consensus layer, where land content is referenced through a hash of the file’s content. From this reference the content can be downloaded from BitTorrent or IPFS. The downloaded file contains a description of objects, textures, sounds, and other elements needed to render the scene. It also contains the URL of a rendezvous server to coordinate connections between P2P users that are exploring the tile simultaneously. Figure 3 shows a diagram of the steps the Decentraland clients execute to provide the experience of a shared virtual world in a decentralized way.
As we already mentioned, MANA is an ERC-20 based token, meaning it can be stored both on the Ledger and Trezor.
Ledger
As for using the Nano Ledger S, the first step towards setting up your device is unboxing and checking if you have received all the accessories coming with it. Once you have unboxed your device, you need to configure it and initialize it before being able to use it. The process is quite simple and will hardly take about 20-30 minutes post which you will be set to use your Ledger Nano S device.
Setup guide video: here
Trezor
As for Trezor, installing is really simple. To properly install it users should attach the unit to the computer. After that continue with installing the bridge which allows the Trezor to join with the computer. The first step is to connect the Trezor to device’s USB slot with the cable given in the box. After that, go to myTrezor.com and proceed with installing the browser extension. Trezor can also be used on Android or an iPhone, or on a Windows or Mac computer. Now, initiate the extension and myTrezor will direct you to pick a PIN. After this, you will notice nine buttons but the numbers are hidden. After this, users should check the Trezor’s screen to recognize which numbers are in which place because it switches every time. Now set the PIN. Shortly after, Trezor should present a 24-word wallet “seed”. In short, one word at a time. Note down this seed and save it carefully. If your Trezor device malfunctions or is lost, you can utilize the seed to reconstruct the complete wallet.
Setup guide video: here
Exodus
First, we have Exodus, which supports a ton of other cryptocurrencies along with USDC and is pretty straightforward and easy to use. Just download the app from the official site(exodus.io) and get straight into creating your wallet. Exodus stores your Private Keys on the machine you choose and not on any server, providing you with a relative peace of mind when it comes to the security of your coins.
Atomic Wallet
Another option is Atomic Wallet.
Atomic Wallet is a desktop wallet built with security, anonymity and decentralization in mind. Atomic Wallet was designed to leverage the potential of atomic swaps and become part of a fully-fledged decentralized cryptocurrency ecosystem. The “physical” wallet itself is a PC application that can be downloaded onto your computer. Your private keys and other data will then be stored on your PC in an encrypted form. This means you hold your own keys, which are encrypted and kept only on your own device, control your own funds and can efficiently swap tokens without needing to go through a centralized exchange.
This application then interacts with the blockchains of supported coins. For example, if you check your transaction history in the program, it looks it up on the blockchain and then shows it to you, rather than storing this potentially sensitive information somewhere.
Since MANA is an ERC-20 token, it means you can use any ERC-20 compatible wallet to store it.
MyEtherWallet
For an online-based wallet, we recommend MyEtherWallet. The wallet offers a brilliant combination of speed, trustworthiness and simplicity, making it the most popular online wallet for ether and any ERC20-based tokens.
Simply visit myetherwallet.com and set up your wallet with a method of your choosing, just make sure to store your private key somewhere safe. It's wise to have it written down on paper in case your PC/notebook malfunctions.
The only downside to using an online wallet like MEW is that there are literally hundreds of phishing scams out there to get your eth, so you better double check the address everytime and make sure to watch out for any malicious activity on your browser or PC.
Credit card and bank transfer options are fairly limited. We'd suggest you buy some ETH or BTC through Coinbase and then exchange it for mana on either Huobi or Binance
Binance
Binanace is the leading crypto to crypto exchange around with over 100 coins supported for deposit and withdrawal.
The exchange accepts users from around the world and has received favorable reviews from the crypto community. Recently the exchange has also partnered with Simplex to allow credit card purchases of cryptocurrencies at a premium.
A flat rate of 0.1% is very lucrative fee for any trader who doesn’t need immediate fiat liquidation. Incredibly, it undercuts most other large exchanges, some of which charge upward of 0.2%. That’s a pretty sizeable difference if you’re working with large orders.
Huobi
Founded in 2013, Huobi is a cryptocurrency exchange with over a million users and more than $1 billion in assets under its custody. Headquartered in Singapore, the company has an international presence. Huobi offers competitive trading fees when it comes to its commissions, as the broker charges 0.2% on major crypto pairs such as BTC/USDT, whether your order is helping to create liquidity or take it away.
