Decentraland, the ambitious, open standards-based social VR world project which uses blockchain to track content ownership, just had a sale of virtual land plots in exchange for Ethereum today (1000 square feet for the ETH equivalent of $24 USD), and it went surprisingly well: In terms of US dollars, the company sold $25 million worth of virtual land instantaneously.

“[The sale] lasted a few seconds,” Decentraland’s Ari Meilich tells me. “It's hard to estimate the total size until we look into it closer, and yes, people bought some big lots, but it'll be resold in the exchanges and we'll get wider distribution.”

These purchases, says Meilich, will be used to fund the production of Decentraland, which is still in prototype phase:

“[It] will finance the development of the protocol, the tools and services that developers will use to build on top of Decentraland, the overall operations, and also will help us build a sizeable pool to bootstrap the network. To beat the chicken-and-egg problem of every nascent network, we're reserving both funds and MANA tokens [Decentraland’s currency] to incentivize developers to join while the number of users (the ‘network utility’) is low. Our token-based model incentivizes early contributors, since they get in at a cheaper price and benefit from growing the network.”

During the test demo, in fact, the prototype was shut down during the token sale for security reasons. “We're being heavily targeted by hackers due to our sale.” But Meilich argues that Decentraland’s core architecture will make users safer from hackers and other bad actors overall: