 to the 2 o'clock to 2.30 p.m. session of the 2020 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce a presentation called Decentraland, a blockchain-based virtual world. Our speaker is Mike Laurie. Mike Laurie is a versatile entrepreneur with extensive virtual world, virtual finance, management, and IT experience. He built one of the top 25 VR development companies in Second Life in 2006 with less than $200 in startup capital, reaching a quarter million dollars in annual revenues in less than a year, providing the first virtual stock exchanges. Please check out the website found at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of sessions, and the full schedule of events. The session is being livestreamed and recorded, so if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at opensimcc with the hashtag OSCC20. Welcome everyone, let's begin the session. Hi everybody, thanks for coming. So this talk is gonna be about a new platform that it is not Open Sim technology, just to be clear. This is something that's much newer. It began in 2016, a group of entrepreneurs raised what's called an ITO or initial token offering on the Ethereum blockchain, $24 million in about 12 minutes auction time to capitalize, creating a new blockchain based virtual world platform. And the idea is that it's trying to bring in newer graphics formats and technologies, and at the same time solving some of the problems with the earlier issues, like for instance, we've all dealt with either copy bought issues, loss of accounts, all kinds of different problems either in Open Sim or in Second Life. And so one of the solutions to fixing a lot of those problems is to have everything based upon blockchain technology. And so Decentraland.org, you can browse there now just to check it out, you can access their virtual world on a browser, you can use goggles as well. It's cloud-hosted, all the content on their world is permanently on the cloud based upon blockchain. I don't know, depending upon, I'm sure there's a wide range of familiarity in the audience on blockchain technology, so I'm gonna explain a little bit about that, but it's based upon Ethereum blockchain technology. They created their own currency token called the MANA, and then there are what are called non-fungible tokens for user name registrations, land and content. And so all of those assets where the names, land or content are secured and protected by what we call smart contracts. And a smart contract is really a computer, a little computer program that's registered on a blockchain and it executes automatically based upon various inputs for various reasons. So you could have, for instance, a smart contract on betting on the Red Sox game or on a friend who might have had marriage contracts on the blockchain, but in this case, each the land token, the content tokens and the name, NFTs are all smart contracts that are registered on the blockchain. And so when you have a contract on the blockchain, it's irrefutable, it's permanently on the blockchain. And so this is something where when you have content on the chain and when you have purchased it through a smart contract, it's yours forever. And so you don't have to worry about, for instance, open SIM grids going away because the owner had management or life issues. You don't have to worry about the game gods not liking what you said or who you talked to or what you did and banning you forever. You don't have to worry about losing your control of your content to copybots and so on and so forth. So these are a lot of the problems that this sort of technology solves. And the content can be sold on the DCLs, what we call DCLs own market. And there are third party markets, basically any website that can handle the Ethereum blockchain-based token economy can trade what we call non-fungible tokens for all of these digital assets. And let's go on to the next one. All right, so basics for what is a blockchain for those who have no idea what I'm talking about. So a blockchain is a relatively new type of database. It was first created as a technology behind Bitcoin. And I'm sure everybody here has heard of Bitcoin. And basically what it is is you have a block of data which is all the transactions for the platform in a certain time period. And they get encrypted and authenticated by users competing to authenticate it in exchange for a reward. And so when that time period's over and the block is solved, then all the new transactions go into the new block and they get linked together by cryptographic hashes. And so the blocks linked together, that's your blockchain. And so you have this permanent indelible record of all transactions for all assets dealt with by the blockchain from its inception up to the present. And so it's really impossible for people to change that data and therefore fraud whatever those assets are. And because the blockchain is open and decentralized everyone can have a copy of the blockchain. And so there's no one central authority that can either change it or control it. And at the same time they can't, it doesn't collapse if that controller goes away because nobody's controlling it. And so it's a completely distributed peer to peer network that ensures the data integrity. Yes. So that's the basis of what a blockchain is. If you wanna learn more, there's tons of videos on YouTube and other sites on the web. You can go and find out a lot more about that technology. We're not gonna get into that here. Okay. So how does the blockchain help with the virtual world? So here we've got a flow chart here. So at the top we have what we call the real-time layer and that's what the user sees at the front. And so basically your web browser presents the virtual world to you and resists your avatar in front of you and so forth. And so it communicates with other nearby clients and peer to peer servers and it gets its data from what's called the land content layer. And so every parcel is essentially a land token on the blockchain and every parcel is therefore secured by a smart contract on that blockchain. And all the content on each parcel is registered with that parcel. And so when you're on a given parcel and you're around nearby parcels, your browser then says, hey, I'm on or near these parcels. Let me see the content. And so it will load the content from the blockchain up through the land content layer into your browser. And so this is how basically how the whole thing functions. And so this way, anybody can have a copy of the blockchain. It's completely secure. And so imagine if we had, for instance, a hypergrid where you had different people controlling different parts of the grid but everybody is a hypergritter and everybody can access the same content everywhere and it's all secure. Okay, so second question that people may have is what is an NFT or non-fungible token? It's a digital asset that's regulated by a smart contract that someone's launched on a blockchain like Ethereum that can execute them automatically. So in Decentraland, NFTs are land. So it's basically a contract D to a virtual land. Each land parcel is 16 by 16 square, a meter square per parcel and these are resellable. When they did their ITO to raise that $24 million in 2016, people didn't get coins, they didn't get stock. What they got was land. So it was essentially a big land rush. And so everybody, all that $24 million is essentially paid for the development of the technology and essentially the permanent hosting of the blockchain on the web forever. And so that's how that whole relationship works. And then another NFT is you can register your name on the Decentraland website. And so like much like a domain name, you essentially, once you've registered it and you paid your 100 mana, which is about $2 or $3, you own it forever. You can resell your name on the Decentraland market because it's a non-fungible token. And then other NFTs are anything, all kinds of virtual content we're used to seeing, clothing, wearables, artwork, buildings, et cetera, building components, et cetera. And all of those are also tradable. So non-fungible tokens, it's like a work of art. So like the Mona Lisa is a non-fungible token, or the ownership of it is, whereas a US dollar or Euro is a fungible token because every dollar's like every other dollar. So like in that respect, the mana currency is a fungible token. How is DCL governed? So because the people who invested all got land ownership, essentially that's the form of stake in what's called a distributed autonomous organization. It has no owner, it's its own sovereign jurisdiction. And so all stakeholders vote on all policy proposals for changes to the architecture and its development. Anyone can buy stake into the Dow by buying one or more parcels of land. And there's a very active land market and land parcels vary in value, but depending upon where they're located, much like we're used to seeing in Second Life, whether you're on a private island or on the mainland or on a road or on waterfront or whatever. And so you have variations in the value. And the great advantage, even though the price of land is high and it's a very active and capital intensive land market, once you own a parcel, there's no tier, no fees of any kind ever. That's yours until you decide to sell it. Gas is a part of the Ethereum blockchain that's paid when you do transactions. So if you buy something or you execute a smart contract, gas is the fee to pay for the computational execution of the smart contract. How do you get content as a user? So as I said, DCL hosts its own NFT market, but any site that trades Ethereum based tokens can trade them. So OpenSea is currently the main third party NFT market for DCL users and creators. You can create your own content and create NFTs for it in whatever distribution you want, either as a single company, a limited release or an unlimited supply. You can create content for builds on your own land or just basically market those to others. The file format, we're used to uploading Kolata files for mesh here. The format that they use is the GLTF file format, which is something you can export from Blenda or Maya or any other 3D modeling application. Okay, so how do you get MANA? MANA is, first off, you can sign into DCL using any Ethereum wallet that can handle tokens. There are some Ethereum wallet hosting sites that can't, Coinbase is one of them, so don't try using Coinbase, but I recommend downloading the MetaMask browser plugin for whether it's your Chrome browser or Brave or whatever other browser you're using. It's a very secure plugin to your browser that is a Ethereum wallet that can handle all of these tokens. And so with that wallet, you can buy Ethereum and once you have the Ethereum, you can trade it for MANA on a number of different exchanges. And so with that MANA, you can pay for your name, you can buy and trade different NFTs. And so all of your content that you own, including your name and your other NFTs, because they're all tokens, your wallet essentially becomes your inventory. And so wherever you go with that in the future, you could theoretically migrate your NFTs that are in your Ethereum wallet to another virtual world that's based on blockchain that uses a similar technology. So if you're not happy with DCL, if someone finds another virtual world using a similar token-based economy, you can migrate your content and you control that based upon what the terms of the smart contracts you obtained it for. Okay, so as I said at the start, Decentraland is not an open sim-based technology, but much like the cyber worlds that were mentioned in the previous talk, which are essentially, were originally called web worlds, we gave a talk, I think it was a Selby and a few others gave talks about the web world technology in the past two years. So these are not strictly open sim technologies, but they're essentially web-based technologies that give people an entry into using virtual worlds without the steep learning curve that we are used to with open sim viewers. Okay, another reason why we're talking about this here is that because of the issues that we've all seen with open sim due to the weaknesses of Second Life, is that the ideas used for this blockchain-based asset system could theoretically be a future development roadmap for open sim developers to make open sim if we finally decide to peel open sim away from its being anchored to Second Life and make open sim a better virtual world than Second Life is to transform the asset system into a blockchain-based system. So this is something where people should be thinking about this is that it can solve all of the problems with content security, content portability, identity, so on and so forth. Well, things that people sell that are freely downloadable is that if you're talking about mesh, that's, you know, there's a wide range of things. Yes, it is, that's correct, Gimezia, is that it protects the content creators' ownership. The reason a lot of things are free in Second Life is because copy-bottying is such a massive problem that Lyndon Lab has steadfastly refused to fix. So here's a couple of builds that I've done in Decentraland for clients. I basically work there as a bespoke builder for people to put the things they hire me to do on their own land. So this was, for instance, a store for a gaming-based token currency that's on a startup basis. Here's another one. This is a classic Mini Cooper museum that I built for a British fellow. Okay, to get it wrapped up here. So that's the presentation. Is there any other questions that we can answer at this time? I think at this point, if you have questions, please IM them to Mike as we need to move on to the next presentation. Thank you, Mike, for a terrific presentation.