Decentraland was co-founded by Ariel Meilich and Esteban Ordano. Decentraland (MANA) defines itself as a virtual reality platform powered by the Ethereum blockchain that allows users to create, experience, and monetize content and applications. In this virtual world, users purchase plots of land that they can later navigate, build upon and monetize. Decentraland was launched following a $24 million initial coin offering (ICO) that was conducted in 2017. The virtual world launched its closed beta in 2019 and opened to the public in February 2020. Since then, users have created a wide range of experiences on their parcels of LAND, including interactive games, sprawling 3D scenes and a variety of other interactive experiences. Decentraland uses two tokens: MANA and LAND. MANA is an ERC-20 token that must be burned to acquire non-fungible ERC-721 LAND tokens. MANA tokens can also be used to pay for a range of avatars, wearables, names, and more on the Decentraland marketplace.

Decentraland began as a proof of concept for allocating ownership of digital real estate to users on a blockchain. This digital real estate was initially implemented as a pixel on an infinite 2D grid, where each pixel contained metadata identifying the owner and describing the pixel's color. The experiment was entitled Decentraland’s Stone Age.

In late 2016, the team started developing the Bronze Age, a 3D virtual world divided into land parcels. The owner of each parcel was able to associate it with a hash reference to a file, using a modified Bitcoin blockchain. From this reference, users exploring the virtual world could use a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) and BitTorrent to download the file containing the parcel’s content, which defines the models and textures to be displayed at that location.

The next version of Decentraland, the Iron Age, will create a social experience with an economy driven by the existing layers of land ownership and content distribution. In the Iron Age, developers will be able to create applications on top of Decentraland, distribute them to other users, and monetize them.
The Iron Age will implement peer-to-peer communications, a scripting system to enable interactive content, and a system of fast cryptocurrency payments for in-world transactions.