Decentraland has published an update on their blockchain-based virtual world project on their official blog. Apparently, I was lucky enough to be one of the first 200 people invited to visit and explore the platform!
The first of Decentraland’s World Explorers – 200 pioneers including district leaders, moderators and content creators – have been sharing their first impressions. In short, they’re loving their time in Decentraland.
While we continue working to fix performance, iron out bugs and stability issues, we’re letting in 50 more people a week, with a goal to increase this to 2000 weekly active users by the end of September. By this time, we hope to have the user-facing features in place that will make World Explorer the complete experience – like being able to create and edit your Avatars inside the client, wear NFT items from your inventory and crucially – so you know where you are in the world – access a navigation map.
Unfortunately, it would appear that the open public beta has been pushed back until October 2019 at the earliest:
As we round into Q4, we’ll be ready to open World Explorer to the entire community. Once we’re satisfied with the stability, scalability and performance, we’ll then turn our attention to the fun and social sides of the experience. Users will:
– Get proper on-boarding
– Experience better content
– Express themselves with Avatar animations
– Travel to popular and trending places thanks to an advanced World Map; and
– Enjoy a set of social features
While the delays are disappointing, I can understand why they are necessary. Decentraland is up and running, but in my opinion it still needs a lot of work and polish before they can open the doors to everybody! If you missed the photos and videos from my first in-world tour, you can see them here. It looks as though thousands of eager DCL investors are going to have to rely on second-hand reports for at least the next couple of months.
In addition to my blogging about Decentraland, the platform is also capably covered by the dedicated blogs DCL Blogger and DCL Plazas. Matty from the DCL Blogger (another one of the first 200 allowed in) has even posted a couple of videos of his visits to Decentraland:
As you can see from Matty’s videos, there is still a lot of empty space in Decentraland. Hopefully, that will start to fill up as more people deploy their creations! There should be some interesting contributions as a result of the upcoming Decentraland SDK Hackathon. There’s still time to enter the contest, and you could win MANA (DCL’s cryptocurrency) and LAND (DCL’s 16 m by 16 m square plots of virtual land) as prizes.
And I will continue to report on developments as the project moves forward. Stay tuned!
