An unnamed user or organization has recently acquired an estate on Decentraland, a virtual reality (VR) platform developed on the Ethereum blockchain, for $215,000. The estate was a 126-parcel piece of LAND, and set a new record for the platform. As first pointed out by Twitter user DCLBlogger, someone used the virtual project’s built-in marketplace to buy the estate with 2.7 million of the platform’s native MANA tokens.
LAND parcels are non-fungible digital assets maintained through a smart contract on the Ethereum network. These represent actual land in a 3-D virtual world that its owners will be able to use for whatever they want to once it goes live. Said virtual world has finite space, and in it each LAND token represents one 10m2 parcel. Once Decentraland goes live later this year on early next year, users will be able to use VR to explore it and interact with applications other users have built. While the platform is expected to be a few major releases away from going live, things are moving quickly. A partnership between Decentraland and the Ripio Credit Network (RCN), a borderless peer-to-peer crypto lending network, has recently also made it possible for the virtual world’s users to use their tokens to take out mortgages. To register for one, according to a Medium blog post, they’ll have to complete a short application and put down at least 10% of the property’s value. Once they do, a decentralized application (dApp) will publish a request so lenders can claim the mortgage at interest ranges that can reportedly go up to nearly 80%. Once a lender claims the request, partial ownership is transferred to the purchaser, who will be able to use it. If the borrower goes into default, the lender may gain full ownership of the parcel. Commenting on its partnership with Decentraland RCN’s CEO Sebastian Serrano stated:
The partnership between RCN and Decentraland — two of the most promising Ethereum-based projects — is one of the first examples that highlights how different smart contracts-based applications can work together. At RCN we drive our efforts to connect lenders and borrowers and offer them. Doing so in virtual reality is an exciting new horizon.
As CryptoGlobe covered, Decentraland is also developing a “strategic role playing game” called Chainbreakers. Decentraland’s native MANA token is currently trading at $0.078 after rising nearly 3% in the last 24 hours.