Decentraland Districts

Powering marketplaces for the metaverse

One of our favorite projects in the space, Decentraland, is an open source initiative to build a traversable virtual reality world. Within Decentraland, habitants can claim land as their own and build anything they wish upon it, from 3d artwork to fully immersive applications such as a VR poker room, for other inhabitants of the world to discover and enjoy.

As in the real world, land in Decentraland is scarce, non-fungible, and transferable; making it a logical asset for trade. Decentraland makes use of the Ethereum blockchain and a native token, the MANA, to implement a process for establishing claims over parcels of land within the world.

The nature of adjacency of land will lead to particular parcels becoming more desirable than others as a byproduct of their surroundings. A parcel which hosts a heavily trafficked installation will naturally enhance the discoverability of content hosted by neighboring landowners, leading to an appreciation in the inherent value of bordering plots.

With a great deal of interest surrounding the project already and a finite amount of parcels available to be claimed, one can imagine the need for a secondary market for land ownership and rentals emerging quickly. We are excited to announce today, in cooperation with the Decentraland team, our intent to build this marketplace and many more on the district0x Network.

A virtual real estate market

The district0x Network is a collective of decentralized marketplaces powered by Ethereum, Aragon, and IPFS. Markets on the network, also referred to as districts, are built upon a shared framework comprised of smart contracts and front-end libraries which provide the functionality necessary to operate communal marketplaces such as applications like Airbnb, eBay, and Uber.

The Decentraland team submitted a proposal for the creation of a secondary marketplace for real estate within Decentraland, modeled after real-world counterparts Zillow and Trulia. The proposal calls for the ability to perform both auctions and offer fixed rate pricing. Listings are to contain screenshots from parcels, their coordinates, and details about the content hosted within.

Participants in the governance processes of the Decentraland district could choose to monetize the market many different ways. Some options include:

Charge a listing fee to post

Extract a brokerage fee from all transactions

Host auctions for premium placement or sponsored listings

The Decentraland district will make use of technology from our friends at the 0x Project, giving consumers the flexibility to transact with any liquid ERC20 token while allowing landowners to receive payment in the currency of their choice. This means that MANA, the native token in the Decentraland metaverse, can facilitate trade in multiple realities in parallel, both within the Decentraland world and in marketplaces existing outside of it.

Sandboxing real world marketplaces

While a secondary marketplace for land may fill the most immediate need for the Decentraland metaverse, we envision such a district being just the first of many to power commerce throughout their world. As an open universe in which inhabitants can freely create in-world items, applications, and environments; a need for other markets which are familiar to us from the real world will arise.

In Decentraland we foresee the opportunity to sandbox a wide variety of markets as districts, putting their feasibility to the test in a virtual world first, giving the Ethereum network ample time to address scaling concerns before turning our focus to disrupting established real-world incumbents with our technology.