Decentraland is an Ethereum-powered virtual reality platform. In this virtual world, you purchase plots of land that you can later traverse, build upon, and monetize. There’s no limit to what you can do. It’s the first digital platform that’s completely owned by its users. Similar to games like Skyrim and Fallout, Decentraland is an all-immersive virtual universe. However, instead of playing on a 2-dimensional screen, you participate in a 3-dimensional world. It seems to be the logical next step before creating full-blown AI-based games in the physical space à la Westworld. Similar groupings on LAND comprise Districts. Districts are basically communities that revolve around a shared theme. For example, there may be a District just for crypto enthusiasts with cryptocurrency apps and services. The Decentraland team is led by Ari Meilich (Project Lead) and Esteban Ordano (Tech Lead). Ordano previously worked at Bitpay as a software engineer and founded Smart Contract Solutions, Inc. Both founders have also worked together in creating Stremium and Bitcore. Decentraland has been around for longer than you may think. The team hit their first development milestone, Stone Age, in June 2015. This was a simple, pixelated grid that allocated pixels to users through a proof-of-work algorithm. Most recently, they held a Terraform Event in which they sold LAND in the new, 3D world. The team has also partnered with district0x, Aragon, and imToken to provide some of their services. MANA is the token used to buy lands in Decentraland. The Blockchain platform can be incorporated in order to buy or sell the various digital assets available in the virtual world. An unclaimed land would have the same market pricing on every exchange possible and precisely the developers are on a hunt for such since as they can build on top of it, and attract lot of popularity. However, one must keep in mind that the land parcels are different from them and each one of them varies according to the various market conditions of that time. Mana can be a great investment and can be bought by trading and with other Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other prominent cryptocurrency and on some of the most notable cryptocurrency exchanges. Specifically, Binance and Huobi are two of the best cryptocurrency exchanges that one can suggest for trading Mana tokens. The Decentraland coin isn’t a minable cryptocurrency as it is issued on the Ethereum blockchain, unlike Bitcoin and other similar currencies. So users looking to engage in some Decentraland mining will be disappointed. Instead, it was sold during token sales and is now being traded on exchanges.
FOAM is an open protocol for proof of location on Ethereum. Our mission is to build a consensus driven map of the world, empowering a fully decentralized web3 economy with verifiable location data. FOAM incentivizes the infrastructure needed for privacy-preserving and fraud-proof location verification. The starting point for FOAM is static proof of location, where a community of Cartographers curate geographic Points of Interest on the FOAM map. Through global community-driven efforts, FOAM’s dynamic proof of location protocol will enable a permissionless and privacy-preserving network of radio beacons that is independent from external centralized sources and capable of providing secure location verification services. FOAM Token Functionality 1. Add and Curate Geographic Points of Interest The FOAM Spatial Index Visualizer allows Cartographers to participate in interactive TCR POIs on a map. Users can add points to the map, validate new candidates and verify the map by visiting real world locations. The FOAM Token Curated Registry unlocks mapping in a secure and permissionless fashion and allows locations to be ranked and maintained by token balances. Users can deposit FOAM Tokens into POIs on the map to increase attention those POIs might receive. 2. Signal for Zone Incentivisation A further potential use of the FOAM Token by Cartographers is to stake their FOAM Tokens to Signal. Signaling is a mechanism designed to allow Cartographers to incentivize the expansion and geographic coverage of the FOAM network. To Signal, a Cartographer stakes FOAM Tokens to a Signaling smart contract by reference to a particular area. These staked tokens serve as indicators of demand, and are proportionate to (i) the length of time staking (the earlier, the better), and (ii) the number of tokens staked (the less well-served areas, the better). In the context of the contingent Dynamic Proof of Location concept (described further in the Product Whitepaper), these indicators are the weighted references that determine the spatial mining rewards. 3. Contribute to Potential Secure Location Services as Zone Anchor or Verifier The FOAM protocol may allow users to provide work and secure localization services and location verification for smart contracts and be rewarded for their own efforts with new FOAM Tokens in the form of mining rewards. Devices and real world contracts can be programmed to designate attestations and track interactions and transactions on the map. With the addition of necessary radio hardware by individual users and the grass roots expansion of the FOAM network, it may be possible for location status to be proved in a different manner. Location could be proved through a time synchronization protocol that would ensure continuity of a distributed clock, whereby specialized hardware could synchronize nodes’ clocks over radio to provide location services in a given area. As explained further in the following paragraph, this ‘Dynamic Proof of Location’ is contingent on a number of factors outside of Foamspace’s control.