I am the original creator of this article and the original published article can be found here on my Medium blog account.
Hello! Welcome to the wonderful world of blockchain, cryptocurrencies and creative minds!
Today, I want to bring focus to a project I have been passively working on for quite a few months now: Virtual Reality Shopping District or VRS District, an 418-unit plot of land within the virtual world of Decentraland aiming to solve very real problems in the entrepreneurship landscape.
If you are unfamiliar with the Decentraland project, I strongly urge you to dive into their Medium publication here. In a nutshell, Decentraland raised approximately $25m in an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) some months ago to build out their vision of a fully decentralized virtual world on the Ethereum blockchain. The project greatly resembles a 14-year old virtual world called Second Life which reached a $600 million economy in 2009 — the same year residents cashed out $55 million.
A major difference between the two projects is that Decentraland is working very closely with their District Creators to help facilitate the growth of District Leaders’ visions for a more robust, global virtual economy. At the same time, they do not charge rent like Linden Lab does on land — Decentraland users will not experience the same economic problems caused by actions taken behind the creating company, like Second Life has in the ‘Acts of Linden.’
Decentraland’s Terraform Event Auction
This is where VRS District was born — the Decentraland team launched their District Proposal process which allowed anybody on Earth to submit District Proposals to the team for their creative vision. Shortly after accepting District Proposals on the Decentraland Github, the 30-day MANA commitment period begun for the Terraform Event.
The image above is the map of Genesis City and the purple cells on the map are the district LAND parcels while the light gray is the LAND that was auctioned off to individuals during the Terraform Event.
This process gave MANA holders two-options:
Place a specified amount of MANA into the auction to bid on LAND for oneself and/or
Commit a specified amount of MANA to a certain district(s) of your choosing.
For #1, LAND started at 1,000 MANA and each bid had to be 25% above the last bid price. Single parcels of LAND reached as high as 80,000 MANA during the Terraform event, equivalent to about $8,500 today.
For #2, each 1,000 MANA contributed to the district equates to 1 parcel of LAND. This is beneficial to District Leaders because we obtained more LAND at a lower price since we’re committing the LAND to the development of our District Proposal.
What Is Virtual Reality Shopping District?
When the Terraform event launched, I contributed 10 parcels of LAND to VRS District to get it going — worth 10,000 MANA. My thoughts were as follows:
“If the community finds my idea valuable, interesting or want to support it in a very real way, I will do everything in my power to bring my vision to life.”
I didn’t say this to anybody and did not expect VRS District to have an additional 408 parcels of LAND contributed by the Decentraland community. At the end of the auction, the proposal garnered 418 LAND parcels to leverage on our journey to developing a Virtual Reality Shopping District to, not only bridge the gap between real-world and virtual-world entrepreneurship, but to also connect virtual world economies with each others as deep as each unique world can be connected.
Image Source
While still working out the details as I put together the White Paper/Business Plan, VRS District’s goals are to:
- Support the creation of jobs while changing what a ‘job’ is to society — it’s very clear that Artificial Intelligence has the potential to create various negative externalities that may ultimately harm the human race. One of those negative externalities is that AI will destroy existing jobs while preventing the creation of new jobs for us. AI can definitely be constructive and is likely to create new jobs, but likely result in a net loss — unless we get creative. On this front, VRS District will house a job marketplace for freelancers and business owners to more effectively connect.
- Data to support/amplify other marketplaces within Decentraland — since communication and data are two very important factors in the real-world, VRS District will work to collect macro/micro-economic data on DCL and other virtual worlds. This data wrapped in easy-to-read reports will give greater legitimacy to the real-world potential of virtual worlds whiles also acting as a go-to place to understand Decentraland’s economic health.
- Bridge the gap between real-world and virtual world entrepreneurship — VRS District will help form opportunities by collaborating with in-world districts, but also by creating partnerships with real-world companies interested in entering the space. This could be a real-world company interested in selling their product in-game as a means to increase their real-world sales. Not only that, VRS will work to form relationships with companies already operating in other virtual worlds while also establishing Headquarter locations in each virtual world the district enters.
- Commercial Real Estate Exchange — by working primarily with businesses/other districts, VRS has the unique opportunity to create more exposure for a virtual real estate exchange. Exposure not only in-world, but in the real-world as well.
- B2B Specialty Mall — VRS will also have B2B vendors within the district that will focus on very specific products/services for businesses within Decentraland districts. For instance, Vegas City is one of the larger districts and will likely work with real-world casinos — content creators who create primarily for businesses could have a special shop/floor where they demo their creations OR even consult with the owners of the casino to create special gambling-related content.
Virtual Reality Shopping District will also utilize real-world and in-world relationships/business partnerships to bring this vision to reality. Virtual Reality technology is currently still behind mass adoption and the Decentraland team continues working to lay the foundation of this new, decentralized virtual world.
Why Is Decentraland LAND So Important?
As mentioned earlier, I would have never pursued bringing VRS District vision to life had the members of the Decentraland community not given me a very real reason to do so — the 418 LAND that makes up VRS District is worth $29,260 of MANA tokens alone, at the current value of $0.07. The value in the LAND parcels alone was enough to rope me into taking this vision serious and to the next level.
Peering into a robust virtual world, Decentraland.
Unlike the rent-seeking model in Second Life, LAND-owners in Decentraland own their land without anything due to the Decentraland team. Meaning, we are free to do as we wish with our district LAND — we can rent it out to individuals or businesses, sell it on the Decentraland LAND Exchange, or even just begin laying the foundation to our virtual life.
Now, this isn’t all about making money. It’s not even my motive in working on this project. Yeah, I want to create value from a monetary standpoint eventually; but my intentions are to initiate positive change using VR technology and entrepreneurship. Without these parcels of LAND, where would I build-out the original vision of a robustly used bridge between virtual-world and real-world entrepreneurship? Is there really a more intimate way to tackle these very real problems facing the human species? Where would a bridge between VR and real-world entrepreneurship exist outside of a virtual world?
The entire process in which this happened has been truly magical. Decentraland first provided us the platform to draft our creative visions, as a community-wide initiative. Then, during their own Terraform/land creation event, they gave those 60+ creators’ visions global exposure in the form of the community contributing MANA tokens to their district. The team deliberately included our visions as an option for their community to bring to life, and here we are.
In Closing
This has been a fun article to write and explain some of what VRS District is about and a call-to-action to check out the Decentraland LAND Marketplace that is open on Monday, March 19th!
If you were a contributor to Virtual Reality Shopping District in the Decentraland Terraform Event, please join the Decentraland Rocket.Chat here and direct message me. My username is (at)crowdconscious or feel free to join this Discord server below!
If you would like to learn more about the Decentraland project, below are links to official resources:
- Are VR and Virtual Worlds a Good Thing? by Carl Fravel
- https://decentraland.org/
- https://decentraland.org/whitepaper.pdf
- Decentraland Discord: https://discord.gg/fdkkyp
- Decentraland Github: https://github.com/decentraland
- Blog: https://blog.decentraland.org/
Information about this District Proposal is likely to change.