Bounty Activity, Week 4 (Dec 11th - 17th)

In-game name: NormanConquest
Games Played: 30+

Twitter Username: @robdixon
Twitter URL: https://twitter.com/robdixon
Tweets last week: Just a couple

Bitcointalk posts last week: just one; planning more

I like the token sale terms that NovaBlitz has set up:

• 75% sold to the public
• Only one tier so it's a level playing field
• Token vesting over 2 years for the team members

It's rare to see a token sale set up so responsibly. It's like they actually plan to build what they say they will.

The team is responsive on Telegram too. Looks good.

I think the weak point is that this is a very complicated project to build. It is a virtual reality MMO world, one of the most complex game worlds you can build. The Decentraland engineering team is strong, but it will still take time to complete this. (An equivalent game project would probably have at least a 12 month timeline at an experienced game studio). There will probably be a period of disappointment in the market if this takes a long time to build.

Even so, a lot of people in the Decentraland user community are enthusiastic about making this happen. When you have hundreds of people creating content for the world, some of them will create amazing things.

If you go here and enter your address in the whitelisted field, then hit Query, it will tell you if you were on the whitelist: https://etherscan.io/address/0x3c337fa1bf8725f59f73db6db719c792c5e8ae74#readContract

If your transaction went through and you got MANA, then you probably were, of course.

The Decentraland Community Whitelist Sale is going on right now: https://blog.decentraland.org/the-community-whitelist-starts-today-13d3299560d5

If you are already on the whitelist, make sure you get your MANA. It's still open for another 15 hours or so.

Yes, if you signed up for the whitelist before the ICO, you should have received an email a few days ago telling you about the limited ($1,000 max) whitelist sale on September 15th.

The Decentraland team has posted a recap of the token sale here:
https://blog.decentraland.org/mana-token-launch-recap-eed3a3ce212

The rumor that the top buyers were all whales is wrong. Most of the top "whales" were pools with dozens or hundreds of individual participants, including:

0x4f96: ico.info: 18,000 ETH, 1,083 participants.
0x9608: BitcoinSuisse: 10,000 ETH, 87 participants.
0xA65E: Gatecoin, 6,900 ETH, 66 participants.
0x4Dc: Cintix’s contract crowd buy, 6,668 ETH, 358 participants.
0x033c: TokenCapital, 2,500 ETH, 160 participants.
0x36f5: 3ICO, 4,000 ETH, 357 participants.

In total there were over 2,000 individual buyers. So it wasn't the big whale party that everyone is complaining about.

But a lot of individual supporters couldn't buy in. I think the moral here is, next time do your buying with a pool. That's what I'll do, anyway.

I think MANA will be a good token to have for a few reasons:

• You can trade it to get your own virtual LAND in the Decentraland world. so it has value beyond just the token
• When people convert MANA to LAND, I believe the MANA will be burned, which will reduce the supply
• There will be a continuous token sale going on after the Decentraland world is implemented. This will increase supply over time, but since some people will trade for LAND it should balance out.
• Everyone loves the idea of the VR world, so the project will hold people's interest for a long time
• The development team is strong, and now they have the investment they need to actually build this world

Lots of people tried to buy in before the sale, but those tx were all unsuccessful. It started at block 4170700 as they said it would. The problem was that a bunch of tx got in there exactly at the starting point. Some of those appear to have been automated scripts, blocking out most people who tried to send from a wallet. Biggest culprit might have been an automated contract that pooled 4,000 ETH into one buy: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethtrader/comments/6u9ou4/never_miss_an_ico_again_decentraland_mana/?st=j6h2jy4x&sh=e5c14a18

There was no whitelist. Looks like some early buyers got in fast by specifying big transaction fees. It was all over in about a minute, but none of those buyers were insiders.

According to Etherscan, the first transactions were accepted at block 4170700, as promised, but was over before block 4170702.

Yes, that address is correct. You should be able to send directly using Metamask.

That blog post has details for direct sending at the end:
https://blog.decentraland.org/how-to-participate-in-the-decentraland-token-sale-1833cf0b8137


To use the JSON wallet file, you import it into any ERC20-compatible wallet app like MetaMask, Mist, MyEtherWallet, etc. Then once the MANA has been received you will see that in your preferred wallet app.

More details are in the blog post.

They closed down the slack channels temporarily in anticipation of the sale starting. There was too much noise happening otherwise. It's a standard practice for most token sale projects.

Yes, there was an official email from the team that went out a few minutes ago. I agree that you should double-check all emails you see to make sure they are not phishing attempts, though. So your caution was not misplaced!

This official blog post describes how to participate in the token sale:

https://blog.decentraland.org/how-to-participate-in-the-decentraland-token-sale-1833cf0b8137

Scroll to the bottom of the page and you can see the address to send to. It should match what you saw in the official email.

There was a whitelist but it was being abused so they stopped it. So the token sale is open to everyone.

The token sale hasn't started yet. The transactions were rejected because people sent ether too early.

The countdown on the website says there are two hours to go until it starts: https://decentraland.org/

Here's an interesting perspective about the Decentraland project and the upcoming token sale:

https://medium.com/@cryptojudgement/decentraland-blockchain-powered-virtual-reality-platform-73a6a483b8b4

I believe Storj ( https://storj.io ) has a lot of customers at the moment -- but that's because their cloud storage service is free for the first 12 months (for 25GB) so I'm not sure how many of those are paying customers. They already have strategic partnerships with Microsoft and FileZilla, though, so their product offering is pretty strong.

I've been impressed with the team's dedication to this project so far. They have tons of experience creating blockchain-based tech and smart contracts, and there have been plenty of 3d artists and game developers getting involved on the Slack channels. I think they will make it happen.

Here's a new blog post to help people who want to participate in the token sale:
https://blog.decentraland.org/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-decentraland-token-sale-a618d7b0f680

There will be a "terraforming event" sometime after the token sale is completed. At that point, people can exchange their MANA currency for plots of LAND in the Decentraland world. After that, LAND owners can create and post the 3D and game content they want to display.

Yes, I confirmed on Slack that this is the official thread.

Some other people have put up competing threads, but those others are not associated with the Decentraland team. Keep checking this one for official announcements and such.

The token sale is only two days away.

Decentraland team just posted more details about their advisory board. Some heavy hitters on the list, including Xiaolai Li of INBlockChain and Jake Brukham of CoinFund:

https://blog.decentraland.org/introducing-decentralands-advisory-board-experts-in-blockchain-social-platforms-p2p-networks-75ef230ab709