The Metaverse Festival is a four-day celebration of music, culture, and creativity in the blockchain-based virtual world of Decentraland (DCL), starting today and running through to October 24th, 2021. Here’s a sitemap with coordinates (you can see this in a larger size on the Metaverse Festival website):
The festival boasts an impressive lineup of over 75 performers, including 3LAU, Alison Wonderland, deadmau5, and Nina Nesbitt. You can get details on when and where to catch your favourite artist on the Decentraland events listing. A complete lineup of performers is on the Metaverse Festival website, which features a suitably trippy design:
A four-day celebration of music, culture and creativity in the virtual social world of Decentraland, the Metaverse Festival is a grand collision of light, sound and portable toilets.
It’s the first event of its kind – a fully decentralized celebration of music that offers a weird and wonderful brew of world-class headline acts, mind blowing stages, games, exclusive artist merch, collectibles and more.
So, on October 21, dress your avatar in your very best wearables and jump into an experience like no other.
And if this is your first time in the virtual world, be sure to take a look at our Festival FAQs, which explain how you can be a part of the fun.
We can’t wait to see you in the metaverse!
Gah, that word again…”decentralized”. Decentraland may be many things, but one thing it is most certainly not is decentralized. Everything runs on Decentraland’s own servers, on Decentraland’s artificially scarce and increasingly expensive virtual land (called, of course, LAND).
It just irritates the hell out of me when PR people cavalierly toss around meaningless descriptions like “a fully decentralized celebration of music”. And “the first event of its kind”? Second Life would like a word. Festivals in virtual worlds have been around for years, people.
Apparently, even Paris Hilton herself is making an appearance at Decentraland’s Metaverse Festival (hmmm, I guess she gave up on Staramba Spaces/MATERIA.ONE, another blockchain platform which I savagely reviewed here and here on my blog). God only knows what she’ll be doing up on stage (probably trying to deejay).
Anyway, that’s enough kvetching for one day. If you want to visit the Metaverse Festival, you will likely need to set up a wallet (here’s a quote taken from the Festival FAQs document):
The best way to fully enjoy the Decentraland experience is to get yourself a digital wallet. Digital wallets work as your personal account, keeping all your digital assets (such as NFTs, LAND, cryptocurrency) and in-world progress safe. And when you return to Decentraland, you just need to hit ‘connect’ and you’re in.
You can still enter Decentraland without a wallet, by signing in with your email address (via Fortmatic) or as a Guest, but you won’t have the chance to – for example – receive daily rewards and airdrops, trade in the Marketplace or log in with a different device using the same ID and avatar.
Learn how to get a wallet with our simple Beginners Guide.
Got all that? Cryptonewbies might also want to refer to the blogpost I wrote when Decentraland first opened its doors to the general public: A Step-by-Step Guide on How to Get Started in Decentraland (and Some Caveats for New Users).
Have fun and enjoy the festival!
You can follow what’s going on in Decentraland via Twitter and Reddit, or catch up the latest news via their blog. You can also join their official Discord server.
UPDATE Oct. 23rd, 2021: I have been informed that Decentraland actually is decentralized; Jin (one of the 600+ members of the RyanSchultz.com Discord) shared the following paragraph from the DCL FAQ:
Does Decentraland run on top of its own blockchain?
Decentraland uses the Ethereum blockchain to store and verify information about LAND ownership and LAND content. It does not run on its own independent blockchain. Content within Decentraland is hosted and served to users via a network of community-owned content servers.
So, I stand corrected! Thanks, Jin 😉 Here’s the GitHub for the software if you want to set up your own DCL content server (and, of course, you need LAND!).