About

Decentraland is an open-source initiative to build a shared virtual reality world. In Decentraland, the content of each piece of land is determined by its owner. You can become a land owner either by having someone transfer you some of their parcels, or by mining new land. A new parcel of land is mined every 10 minutes.

Explore Decentraland

Components

• Node: An open and trustless land ownership record and scene content distribution network.
• Editor: An easy to use 3D scene editor, that lets you publish scenes directly to any of your parcels.
• Browser: A browser for navigating the virtual world of Decentraland.

Node

A Bitcoin-like blockchain is used to maintain a universal record of land ownership, and a consensus of the virtual world description.

In the Decentraland blockchain, transactions can transfer the ownership of a given land parcel, as well as announce the hash of the scene content of the parcel. At any given time, the UTXO set has the description of the entire virtual world. The actual content of land parcels is distributed in a P2P manner, via the torrent network.

New blocks are mined with the same proof of work as Bitcoin, but instead of having a coinbase transaction creating fungible coins, there's a landbase transaction creating a single non-fungible asset: a land parcel at a unique, non-modifiable position.

Design

The Decentraland node is a fork of bcoin, a Bitcoin full-node implementation in JavaScript. In what follows we describe all the places where we depart from Bitcoin.

Consensus rules

Instead of having the coin value, Decentraland transaction outputs have the parcel x and y coordinates, and the info hash of the torrent with the 3D scene content for the parcel.

All transactions (except for landbase transactions) have exactly one output for each input. Each output MUST have the same x and y coordinates as the spent output of its corresponding input. Outputs MAY change the info hash field.

The single output of a landbase transaction MUST claim a non-allocated land parcel, adjacent (with 4-connectivity) to a previously mined parcel.

RPC API

There's two new JSON RPC endpoints that facilitate creation and querying of land content:

• gettile(x, y): fetches the torrent info hash of a tile's content.

• settile(x, y, base64-content): publishes the content to the torrent network using WebTorrent and creates a transaction updating the torrent info hash of one of your tiles.

Land content server

After each valid new block in the main chain, the node downloads from the torrent network the updated land content for each transaction in the block, effectively maintaining a parcel to scene index.

By default, the node serves a static web server at port 9301 with the latest scene content files for each mined parcel of land. The land content file for the parcel at (x, y) is served at GET /tile/x.y.lnd

Run a node

Make sure you have Docker installed, and run:

docker-compose up

Mining will start by default. To disable this, edit the file bin/start and remove the --startminer argument.

How can I edit the land I own?

Once you mine some land, you can use Unity to edit its content. Check out the editor for more information.

Community

Join us on Slack!

We're on Twitter too.