Enabling permissionless land renting through LandWorks

In today’s world, renting is a well-established concept. Whether you rent an apartment, a car or land to grow crops, the process of granting the temporary use of X in return for a fee is quite familiar. However, executing it in a trustless way on the blockchain is a different story.

LandWorks (an EnterDAO product) enables permissionless and trustless renting of metaverse land for Decentraland and Voxels on the Ethereum blockchain. The LandWorks protocol has undergone two audits by Quantstamp and Omega and has handled more than a year worth of rentals.

In order to enable renting, the LandWorks protocol technically introduces the role of the consumer. The consumer is an actor that does not have transfer permissions, but has rights for “consuming” the NFT (e.g building a scene/experience on top of a land NFT). The architect of LandWorks @danielkivanov has submitted EIP-4400 which will be finalised on 27th of May as an official extension to the ERC-721 standard.

LandWorks provides solution to already existing projects, which do not implement the ERC4400 standard, but want to enable renting to their users. Through a custom adapter created by the LandWorks development team, projects can enable renting and landlords can list their land for rent. The adapter by itself is a smart contract which changes the consumer address (not owner) of a token and it interacts with LandWorks’ protocol. The adapter is needed as the majority of ERC-721 tokens do not support the consumer role described in EIP-4400. If a project has implemented the EIP, the adapter wouldn’t be necessary. It is there to allow renting without the need to upgrade/migrate your ERC-721.

In order for a project to use the adapter and enable renting there are several steps to be followed:

1. EnterDAO votes on a DAO governance proposal for adding a particular metaverse project.
2. If the community vote passes, the EnterDAO team works with the Metaverse project to update the UI of the LandWorks platform to support the metaverse in question. This step usually takes around two weeks.
3. The Metaverse project updates its authentication check to read the consumer set by LandWorks in the adapter contract for the property at hand. This step requires adding three lines of code and no contract upgrade is needed.

After completing all the steps, the Metaverse project will be integrated into LandWorks just as the ones we already support.

Depending on the features of the Metaverse projects, we can work to add more functionalities like an interactive map, nearby properties and further metadata details for each land.

You can find the link to the adapter itself on LandWork’s repository here.

So if you are engaged in a Metaverse project where you want to see permissionless renting, come to our Discord and drop us a line. You can also reach out to @danielkivanov, @zhivkoto or @fungibletaco on Twitter.

We are excited to help you enter the metaverse!