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.
Pundi X is the project that wants to make spending crypto as easy as a credit card. Creators of the NPXS token hope that it will one day be used on their Ethereum-based Point-of-Sale devices. This approach could give basic banking services to underdeveloped regions like Latin America and Indonesia. One of the most notorious pain points in crypto is the ability to actually make purchases. Pundi X cryptocurrency plans to change all that by distributing hundreds to thousands of point-of-sale smart devices to retailers so they can accept payment in the form of NPXS, the network’s proprietary crypto token. If it can distribute the devices for free and with lower transaction fees than current card and mobile payment solutions provide, it’s a grand-slam idea. Pundi X raised $35 million during its ICO from September 2017 through January 21, 2018. 35,000,000,000 NPXS (at the time known as PXS) were sold during the ICO presale and crowd sale. The team retained 15,750,000 and another 1,750,000,000 was distributed to early investors and the rest was held by Pundi X for further development and marketing. It also set aside 2 percent of sold tokens to fund bounty programs across social media and online platforms. The Pundi X team are a talented group of technologists and entrepreneurs, which seems to be exactly what this project will need for success. In general the management team is comprised of computer engineers turned serial entrepreneur. The glaring exception to this is CEO and founder Zac Cheah, who was formerly an HTML games developer, but perhaps this is why he surrounded himself with such a strong team. The President of Pundi X, Constantin Papadimitrou, has a long history of founding successful fintech companies, and scaling them, which makes him an ideal fit for a project that will need rapid growth and adoption. The CTO/COO Pitt Huang created and sold his first business by the age of 25 and went on to create and sell several more business, including one that had over 200 employees. The company is working on developing a card, which they are naming the XPASS card, which will work together with the mobile app and wallet, enabling payments and deposits by card (a familiar medium for most) that are pulled from the mobile wallet. In addition, users should be able to see the current market price of each cryptocurrency before paying for goods and services, allowing them to pay with the cryptocurrency that brings the best value at the time. This ability to pay for things easily with cryptocurrencies is what will finally give them real value in a widespread sense. Pundi X has taken on an impressive and ambitious task in tackling what could amount to everyday adoption of cryptocurrencies by the masses, if their vision is realized. The technology seems appropriate for what they’re attempting, and the delivery of the first 500 POS devices shows that there is substance behind their efforts.'