The last few weeks have been full of some exciting developments here at Decentraland. First and foremost, we recently , with additional . We’ve really enjoyed watching how quickly the community took to the Marketplace, and are already making improvements based on your feedback.
If you haven’t already, check out to start browsing parcels of LAND. Currently, we’re hard at work getting things ready for our upcoming software development kit. Stay tuned for news on the SDK in the coming weeks!
Improvements in the Marketplace
We were really happy with the initial launch of the Marketplace, but our dApps team didn’t waste any time in putting together a series of updates. Today, we added new, public transaction history logs to every parcel. These logs allow you to view the transaction history for an individual parcel of LAND, including each price it was sold for, in addition to the public address of every buyer and seller.
We’ve also made it possible for you to transfer MANA (not just LAND) directly to other accounts from your wallet in the Marketplace.
To help clarify these new (and existing) features, we’ve applied some fresh UI designs.
Decentraland on the Road
Our founders, Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, have just returned from a trip to New York City where they met with a few leading VR firms to discuss the potential for collaboration between our teams. Stay tuned for more updates on this front in the next several weeks.
We also had the pleasure of co-hosting a private screening of Ready Player One with our friends at the . We had an awesome post screening Q&A session with , where we talked about the future of VR and how crypto-collectibles are driving the growth of blockchain-based gaming.
On the opposite coast, our advisor Kieran Farr will be presenting a demo of our upcoming SDK at the Augmented Reality San Francisco Bay Area Meetup on Monday, April 23rd. There’s still room left, so ! The Decentraland SDK will be a big step toward enabling developers and content creators to start building engaging and interactive games, applications, and experiences for Decentraland. This is sure to be an interesting meetup, so don’t miss out if you’re in the area.
Content Partner Program Ramping Up
As we prepare the SDK for release, we want to make sure that we are able to assist third-party development teams in building some of the first content that will be hosted on the Decentraland platform. To this end, we’ve begun setting the groundwork for a Decentraland Content Partner Program. Together, we want to produce high-quality and engaging experiences for our community to enjoy. We’ll have more information on this initiative soon.
Interactive Experience Starter Kits
From static 3D primitives and models with skeletal animations to game development scaffolding and in-world video playback support, we want to help our community bootstrap their parcels with example architectures representing a range of possible experiences. We’re calling these our Interactive Experience Start Kits, and they are almost ready.
They will be available with the release of our SDK to members of the Content Partner Program!
Developer Plan File
Finally, in the spirit of transparency, Christopher Chapman, most recently of The Walt Disney Company and now our Decentraland Experience Architect, has begun to track pieces of his daily work on his Github account (@m3mnoch).
Follow along, and let us know if you’d like to see more developer diaries like his.
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was originally published in on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Selfishly, this could be the moment digital economist Stefano Pepe has been waiting for.
Pepe, the CEO and co-founder of San Francisco-based identity blockchain startup , believes that blockchain technology, a digitized, decentralized, and tamper-proof ledger, could be a solution sooner than later.
He quickly points to the nearly 150 million people (and counting) affected by the massive data breach last year at credit rating agency Equifax. And now Facebook, the world’s largest social network, is reeling after admitting the personal information of more than 87 million users on its platform was misused by Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based consultancy firm that uses personal data to influence elections. Facebook’s scandal is so severe that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to testify before Congress yesterday on how he’s trying to fix it.
“There’s definitely a problem with digital identity and we’ve been avoiding it for far too long,” Pepe said. “This is a high-level situation that needed to be solved yesterday.”
UniquID protects personal identities and institutional assets inside a network of smart devices, using blockchain.
At a time when there’s more access to people’s data than ever before, and instutions breaching the public trust are increasingly common, Pepe and others hope the encryption technology that supports bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, could be the answer.
However, we may be years away, experts say. But given what’s happening to a global behemoth like Facebook, now is the time for serious conversations about whether blockchain, which startups want to use for everything ranging from tracking and , can do the same for .
“Our most precious data is our identity, and we need to be in control of it,” said Pepe, 38, who began working on UniquID three years ago. UniquID allows smart devices to connect with each other, without the internet, through a blockchain trust layer, thus “keeping their identity and valuable data away from remote and potentially vulnerable concentration points,” according to its website.
Pepe thinks people having their own secure ID through a blockchain provider will give them more authority in what’s known as . The hope is that this gives them more control of their identities across the internet and reduce the chance of a a service provider suffering a data breach.
For example, Pepe said blockchain is already based on cryptography technology that supports self-sovereign identity. This involves a complex set of digital keys to ensure a person uses their unique identity when making a transaction to the blockchain and it was that person who made the transaction.
In short, the data remains consistent among the users, Pepe added.
“That’s why there has to be some discussions and trial-and-error,” he said. “We have to go in this direction. We don’t want our information and identities to be at risk, like it is today.”
Titus Capilnean, who heads up communications at , a digital security identity startup that uses blockchain, agrees. “We have to effectively get to a place where we’re not merely passive about knowing where our data goes,” he said.
But it could take years before blockchain could be used for identity management purposes, said , an analyst with Forrester. There will need to be a lot of explaining to the public and businesses about the uses of blockchain beyond banking.
“Those who persevere with their blockchain initiatives are not only aware (sometimes painfully) that the technology is still at a very early stage of development, but also understand that this isn’t really about technology, but about business,” Bennet said in a post last year. “You need to be prepared to be in it for the long haul, as the true transformational potential of blockchain-based networks will take a long time to materialize.”
was originally published in on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
The VEN digital asset still stays below $3, but has started to appreciate against bitcoin.
Long Blockchain’s days of being listed on the Nasdaq come to an end on Thursday.
