Decentraland, where NFTs meet a virtual world

Digital platforms, such as Roblox, Minecraft and Fortnite, have emerged as digital spaces that offer near-real-life experiences. Decentraland’s world offers a chance to own a piece.

When Decentraland launched in 2017, the digital world’s developers sold land parcels for about $20 apiece.

The Decentraland virtual community expanded in the years that followed, but it remained a tiny and relatively unknown part of the internet — until the NFT boom struck. In the digital realm, a handful of parcels will now sell for anything from $6,000 to more than $100,000.

“I have to pinch myself at the moment because it’s really come so fast,”
Sam Hamilton, the Decentraland Foundation’s head of culture and activities.

Decentraland, like Second Life, is an online world where users can make avatars, engage with other users, and participate in activities ranging from concerts and art shows to creating houses on their digital lots.
And if they aren’t physically together, friends from all around the world will meet for activities to feel a feeling of belonging.

Second Life, one of the first such virtual environments, surpassed one million monthly users in 2013, and it continues to have hundreds of thousands of users. Since then, other gaming outlets, such as Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite, have arisen as digital environments that deliver near-real-life encounters, dubbed the “Metaverse” by venture capitalist Matthew Ball. Travis Scott’s virtual concert in Fortnite in April 2020 attracted more than 12.3 million concurrent audiences.

Decentraland is a virtual world run by its users. Every piece of land and every item in the virtual land is a non-fungible token. Some of them sell for thousands of dollars

However, Decentraland has a unique experience. From its virtual plots of land to the paintings on the walls of its virtual galleries, almost all in Decentraland is an NFT. Ownership also provides consumers power of how the virtual universe works.

NFTs, which stand for “non-fungible tokens,” are a form of cryptographic certificate of authenticity that utilizes blockchain technologies to offer a safe way to trace who owns a digital object. Although NFTs have been around for a while, they are now the trendy new trend, inspiring a record-breaking $69 million piece of art auctioned by Christie’s and a rush on NFT-related NBA highlights.

“The underlying philosophies of Decentraland is for the people to take back control of the internet and decide in which directions it goes in,”
Hamilton 

The mixture of NFT-fueled decentralization and an interactive online environment has persuaded some consumers that the web has the ability to become a destination. Jill Swartz, also known as CryptoYuna online, is organizing the first all-female art exhibition in Decentraland on Saturday.

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“This has forever changed my art path. This is where I’ve found my biggest community,”
Swartz said.

“Just that whole world opens up. Once you start getting in there and on the platforms and knowing the community, you just start learning more and more and more and exploring,”
she added

For the exhibition, the Decentraland foundation developed a virtual skate park that will feature work by the Graffiti Kings, a U.K.-based art collective. It will be open for use throughout the art exhibition, which has expanded to fill several gallery spaces across Decentraland.

Darren Cullen, the Graffiti Kings’ manager, and Swartz are adamant that the art show will set an example and serve as a foundation for future shows.

“This place is going to blow up,” Cullen predicted. “It’s because record stores used to be everywhere, and now there aren’t any because of MP3s, and I believe the same will be so for art galleries.” They’ll fail like record shops because everybody is making these artworks digitally by NFTs.”

“I always thought that when we pulled the trigger, the people would understand the narrative and we’d finally see that this is something really special,” he said. “I’ve always felt that if we do it right, we will be as successful as the big tech firms today.”