Decentraland Dev Update — October 30th, 2017
Terraform Auction, Decentraland Editor and an alpha Web Client.
October was a great month at Decentraland. It started off with the addition of Ben Nolan to our Dev team after the launch of the Terraform Registration app. Last week, we published the alpha version of our A-Frame-based parcel editor and on-boarded another great engineer: Michal Takac. Finally, we presented our project progress at the San Fransico WebVR/AR Meetup and got our MANA token listed on various exchanges.
November is looking to be even more exciting!
Terraform Auction Updates
One of the most important projects we’ve been working on is the Terraform Auction. We are looking forward to seeing how the initial land plots will be distributed and are excited about what kinds of experiences people are getting ready to build in Genesis City. The expectations are high, which is why we’ve been working to build a strong foundation to power the auction.
The auction will be conducted through an off-blockchain process with the goal of saving on gas costs and avoiding potential confirmation issues. For each bid received, we’ll issue a receipt that will be cryptographically signed and have a sequence number. This will allow everyone to check that their submission was correctly included in the final result. The application will be open source, and the process independently verifiable: we will publish the database contents so that anyone can replay each step of the auction and verify the process.
We are in the process of finishing up the design of its user interface, and are planning to have it ready by mid-November. If everything goes as expected, we intend to conduct a dry-run of the auction by November 20th. Stay tuned for more details!
Governance and Districts
We are also discussing and working on the design of decentralized governance methods for the districts. We are currently gathering feedback on what district participants need: some issues include governance models and dApps for ruling over content or land ownership, among others. Given the early stages of decentralized governance tech, a more centralized approach is our inevitable fallback: for the time being, districts will centralize decisions on an individual or group of district leaders. We will publish a guide on how district leaders can use a multisignature wallet to own and control their parcels.
Another exciting project in the works is the review of the first smart contract that interacts with our LAND smart contract. This will facilitate a way for people to lease land and was contributed by Alonzo Coeus. Districts may also use this work as the base layer to enable their members to modify only the content on parcels assigned to or owned by them, yet allowing the district to take back control of the parcel, in case it is not aligned with the district’s purpose.
Product Plan and Updates
Launching the alpha version of the editor is the first of four steps towards having an alpha version of the Decentraland Iron Age.
Our next step is to work on making the Decentraland Editor publish content to the Ethereum network, by registering it on the LAND smart contract we’ve been working on.
The third and fourth steps concern updating the client to load data from IPFS/IPNS, and have it work in sync with the LAND Smart Contract. We will be starting to use the Decentraland Specification Proposal #20, regarding the format required to fully describe a land parcel’s content.
If all of this goes smoothly, then an alpha version of the Iron Age will be up and running by December. At that point, the pioneers of Decentraland will be able to start working on their parcels. All in all, we’re pretty close to having a fully functional prototype with which we can already start building!
As a final note, we want to thank all of you who helped us through this process, especially to those involved in building the districts! We are very glad this is all coming together and we hope to see you soon in the metaverse.
Remember that you can stay in touch with us through:
- The Decentraland chat.
- Subscribing to email updates on our mailing list.
- Following us on Twitter.
- Subscribing to our subreddit.
