DeFi

What is Decentraland (MANA)? Everything You Need to Know

Published

2 years ago

August 13, 2021

admin

Decentraland is a virtual world and community based on blockchain technology. Users develop and own plots, artworks and Unique Tokens (NFTs). Members also become participants in the platform’s Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO).

Being a DAO, Decentraland empowers its community to participate in the governance of the project. Decentraland’s native currency is MANA and all in-game assets are on the Ethereum blockchain.

If you’ve played Second Life before and bought and sold cryptocurrencies, then Decentraland might be of interest to you. Since its launch in 2016, the platform has evolved from a simple 2D experiment to a massive 3D world.

Decentraland’s developers, Esteban Ordano and Ari Meilich, have created a virtual world containing digital real estate parcels, items, and other customizable assets. All of these can be purchased with Decentraland’s ERC-20 token MANA.

Decentralanders can buy MANA from various exchanges for crypto or fiat currency. ERC-721 unique tokens represent Decentraland’s unique assets such as LAND properties and other collectibles.

How does Decentraland work?

Decentraland is an online world that combines virtual reality with blockchain technology. Unlike many other online games, players have direct control over the rules of the online world. DAO tokens offer holders direct voting rights on in-game and organizational policies. This mechanism affects everything from allowed item types to investments by the DAO’s treasury.

Unique tokens; represent in-game collectibles, including clothing, items, and the game’s virtual real estate, LAND. Users keep these tokens in their crypto wallets and sell them to other users on the Decentraland Marketplace. For example, in order to buy yourself a new face mask, you must have MANA, the local currency of Decentraland.

Apart from buying and selling items and property, players can fill their personal space with games, events, and artworks to interact with others. There is also the option to cash out your LANDs. What they do with their land is entirely in the hands of the players.

Your destiny, success and ultimately your journey depend on you, your efforts, and your imagination.

Decentraland has many uses such as advertising and content creation. But for new players who want to start using NFTs, the barrier to entry is quite high. The cost of purchasing some cosmetics is almost doubled due to Ethereum gas fees. Land fees are also thousands of dollars, making owning property very expensive for some players.

What is LAND and MANA?

As we mentioned earlier, MANA is the local currency of Decentraland. Not only does it function as a digital currency, it also gives anyone holding MANA the power to vote in the Decentraland DAO.

To participate in the governance of the DAO, users must convert their MANA to wrapped MANA (wMANA) and lock it to DAO. Each wMANA represents one vote on governance resolutions. You can get MANA on exchanges or by selling collectibles in Decentraland’s Marketplace. The DAO also has its own MANA treasury to fund its decisions and operations.

LAND is a unique token representing lands owned by players in the community. Similar to MANA, it offers voting power under Decentraland’s governance protocol.

However, LAND does not need to be locked in the DAO and offers two thousand votes per LAND token. Players with multiple lands can combine them under a single Estate token. The Estate token grants voting power equal to the number of lands it contains.

What is a Decentraland DAO?

One of the interesting features of Decentraland is its focus on decentralization. As we mentioned earlier, the player community controls Decentraland’s lands, digital assets, and developments.

The project uses open-source code to organize the rules as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Anyone who stakes their MANA or owns a LAND can prepare and vote on motions.

Decentraland DAO runs on DAO software solution Aragon and uses an Agent that can interact with Ethereum smart contracts.

Decentraland using cases

From the design stage, Decentraland’s developers considered the platform’s potential for new uses in blockchain-based communities. Five main usage areas are mentioned in the whitepaper:

Applications: Users can create applications and 3D scenes with Decentraland’s scripting language for richer interactions.
Content Creation: Neighborhoods that emerged in Decentraland brought like-minded people together and led to the formation of organic communities.
Advertising: Player traffic in neighborhoods has led brands to buy space and place billboards to advertise.
Digital Collectibles: NFTs that are accumulated, created, and traded on the Decentraland Marketplace give ownership to users.
Social: Communities on social media platforms, even offline groups, can experience more interactive ways to socialize with friends.

Like most games involving blockchain economies, you can get a chance to make money here. Speculation is rampant, and some LANDs in high demand can charge very high prices.

How to store MANA and LAND?

To fully interact with Decentraland, you need a crypto wallet that integrates into your browser. The development team recommends storing your MANA (ERC-20) and LAND (ERC-721) tokens in MetaMask.

Decentraland is quite unique among blockchain virtual reality platforms. This platform is completely free to explore, so you can easily make up your own mind by browsing this world. The development team of the project has made a small project quite mature compared to other crypto projects in five years.

DeFi

What Exactly Is Arbitrum?

Published

10 months ago

October 25, 2022

Efekan Ozdan

Ethereum is a well-known platform for creating decentralized applications (DApps). However, due to a rapid increase of its users in recent years, the network has been pushed to its ultimate limits, causing transaction costs to skyrocket and widespread congestion.
Some believe that on-chain changes and improvements are the best approach to expand Ethereum, however, others are opting for second layer alternatives.

Although they differ widely in terms of appearance and purpose, one such option, known as Arbitrum, has begun to gain attention.

What Is Arbitrum?

It is one of the layer 2 solutions that enhances the capabilities of Ethereum smart contracts by increasing their speed and scalability while also providing extra privacy features.
The platform is meant to make it simple for developers to run unmodified Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) contracts and Ethereum transactions on a second layer and at the same time taking use of Ethereum’s superior layer 1 security.

It’s designed to address some of the current Ethereum-based smart contract’s problems, such as inefficiency and high execution costs, which have harmed the Ethereum experience for users and frequently make transactions costly.

DeFi

NFT Gas Prices: What Are They? Getting To Know Ethereum, Gas, And Gwei

Published

10 months ago

October 24, 2022

Efekan Ozdan

What exactly is ETH Gas?

The Ethereum network uses the Gwei as a unit of gas. Miners need gas to process transactions, which is one of the main differences that seperates Ethereum from other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin.

“How much gas you’ll need depends on the size of the contract you’re aiming to complete and how quickly you want to complete it.” The price usually reduces if you’re patient enough to wait for a transaction to finish. Both NFT art makers and collectors benefit from understanding this idea.

If we want to have a look at the technical side, Ethereum’s native currency, ether (ETH), is used to pay gas fees. Gas costs are expressed in Gwei, which is an ETH denomination — one Gwei equals 0.000000001 ETH (10-9 ETH). Instead of claiming that your gas costs 0.000000001 Ether, you may say that it costs 1 Gwei.

Why is there Gas?

The gas in Ethereum is a crucial regulator that prohibits spamming the network. All Ethereum computations push the security measure to its limit. Gas limits, which are paid for with each computational execution, have the mission to ensure that bad individuals do not exploit unsorted amounts of processing power to become de-facto coders on the Ethereum network and corrupt the future they worked hard for creating.

Why Gas is so important for NFT arts and artists?

Gas has two sides to it. When gas costs are rising, it is difficult for uprising artists to generate, mint, and even purchase other works. Some artists try to include the cost of gas into their paintings (which indicates that they are ready to lower the cost of their art, to make their art easier to buy.) This creates a catch-22 because the art’s perceived “worth” is reduced when collectors are deciding whether or not to spend 25-57 percent of the overall purchase price on gas. Artists aiming to build a reputation for themselves face a difficult situation in this regard. On the other hand, artists might overcharge while selling their work (paying higher marketplace and gas costs) in order to get their work published before they have built a reputation for themselves to be able to charge that much.

Overwhelming and Absurd NFT Gas Cases

We’ve seen gas costs exceed the cost of a piece of art being created in some cases, leaving artist in a very difficult situation to put their work online. Actually, making it impossible for the artist.

Solutions for NFT Gas

Allow the NFT Artists to have more power when their work is minted. Many marketplaces only let artists to create something at the very moment they click mint. Artists should be able to choose how long they want to wait for network congestion to clear before publishing. This is already implemented in NFTGateway (As far as I know). The painting isn’t minted until it has been bought during a drop. The art might not appear in wallets instantly, the transaction might take 24 hours. While we haven’t experienced such a long wait, we have seen up to two-hour waits for costly drops expectations.

The User receives back any unused gas

Finally, it’s essential to emphasize that not all transactions use the total gas supply. This should be better stated, and we’ll need to undertake further studies to find out what proportion of gas is returned on average. However, you’re essentially accepting to a maximum amount of gas fees that you’ll pay to complete the deal.

DeFi

What is Play-To-Earn (Play2Earn) All About? Begginer’s Guide

Published

1 year ago

March 3, 2022

Efekan Ozdan

The play-to-earn business model promotes the idea of an open economy by rewarding players who contribute to the metaverse’s value.

Play-To-Earn (Play2Earn) games are a type of gaming in which a platform allows players to earn any type of in-game property that can be transferred to the real world assets that has value like money.

Play-to-Earn Crypto Gaming: Begginer’s Guide

Video game business models have evolved to a whole new level as technology has become more widely accessible to the public. Before, people were able to play games only in certain gaming areas on arcade machines. With a bag full of quarters, gamers would compete for the highest score. But, as technology advanced, games were introduced to our smartphones, PCs, and gaming consoles such as the PS5, Xbox, and others.

What Is Play-to-Earn Gaming?

In the blockchain ecosystem, a new game paradigm known as play2earn is currently being seen around the world. It effectively allows participants to profit from their participation in games. By participating in the in-game ecosystem and earning assets for their contributions, players create value for other gamers and developers. Coins and accessories that have been tokenized on the blockchain are examples of digital assets. As a result, blockchain games and the play-to-earn business model support each other effectively.

Play to Earn Games

Axie Infinity is an excellent example of a play2earn game. Axies are charming animals that players buy, breed, and combat for rewards in this game. Each Axie is a non-fungible token (NFT), which means it’s a unique digital collectible. There is an entire economy within the game (There is a world known as Lunacia).

Users can use their in-game tokens, Smooth Love Potion (SLP), and Axie Infinity Shards (AXS) to buy land and breed Axies in Lunacia. In addition, these tokens are not just useful in the game, they are also useful in real life.

Play-to-earn games, such as Axie Infinity (AXS), are already assisting people all over the world (particularly those who live in countries affected by the current pandemic severely) earning a significant amount of money. People in the Philippines are making $1,500 to $2,000 per month playing Axie Infinity as a hobby, according to estimates. A good number of people in Vietnam have also given up their full-time jobs as a result of these games, which pay well.

Lost Relics, Splinterlands, CryptoBlades, DogemonGo, and Sorare are some of the other NFT games.

In 2021, the NFT market will have topped $2.5 billion in revenues, and this figure is expected to rise rapidly as new NFT games hit the market. The rise of NFT is leading to a new era of revenue streams in the blockchain world, and it won’t be long before it overtakes every other major business.