Users Pay $1M for Digital Land as 2017 ICO Finally Opens Virtual World

Almost three years after its ICO, Decentraland has opened its platform — a virtual world in which participants buy and sell fake land, as well as construct buildings. 

Over the past ten days, Decentraland gamers have purchased over $1 million worth of digital anchorage on the Ethereum-based virtual reality product, Bloomberg said in a Feb. 20 article. Decentralanders use the project’s native crypto asset, MANA, as payment within the game. 

Users interested in Decentraland

Conducting its ICO during the crypto craze of 2017, Decentraland raised over $20 million selling its MANA token. 

Reminiscent of the popularity seen in the Crypto Kitty days of 2017, Bloomberg reported Decentraland’s digital land now sees more trading activity than any other Ethereum-based asset, citing data from NonFungible

Etherscan, however, still shows Crypto Kitties at the top of its Non-Fungible Token Tracker list, with Decentraland sitting in thirteenth place. 

Classified as nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, Decentraland assets are not all the same, so they are not all mutually exchangeable.

A DAO runs Decentraland

A decentralized autonomous organization, or DAO, built on Ethereum’s network, keeps tabs on Decentraland, ensuring the whole operation works as planned, Bloomberg detailed. Developers are paid, without human intervention, for constructing the game’s inner workings.

“The users are in control of the digital assets, which is something that hasn’t happened before,” Decentraland’s project head Ari Meilich told Bloomberg. “We think that over time players will gravitate toward games where they are more in control.”

Decentraland recently came in second on Cointelegraph’s list of the five most expensive non-fungible tokens of 2019.