Decentraland: MANA, LAND and a metaverse world 98 percent below its record

Decentraland is a virtual 3D world on the Ethereum blockchain in which land, avatar clothing and names are traded as NFTs and the MANA token serves as currency and voting right. The platform opened to everyone in February 2020, raised around $26 million in an ICO back in 2017 and was one of the best-known crypto projects of all during the 2021 metaverse hype. Today Decentraland is above all a cautionary tale: the technology keeps running and governance sits with a DAO, but the MANA price is almost 99 percent below its record, and the number of visitors has been disputed for years.

For investors the topic is nonetheless tangible. MANA is a freely tradable crypto asset that you can buy on a crypto exchange, and the land parcels are called LAND and sit as NFTs on NFT marketplaces. This profile explains how the world is built, what MANA and LAND stand for technically, what measured usage shows and which rules apply when buying. You will not find buy signals here, but you will find the figures you need to judge for yourself.

Decentraland at a glance: a virtual world on the Ethereum blockchain since 2020

Decentraland is an online world you can walk through, similar to a computer game that you launch in the browser or with a dedicated desktop app. You move with an avatar through streets and squares, visit galleries, concerts or arcades and meet other visitors. The difference from a classic game lies in ownership: whoever owns a parcel of land, an item of clothing for the avatar or a name holds a token for it in their own wallet. The operator cannot simply delete or confiscate it.

The idea comes from Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano, who published the first white paper in 2017 together with other developers. The blockchain is a public ledger in which every token transfer is stored permanently and verifiably for everyone. Decentraland uses the Ethereum blockchain for this. The content of the world, meaning 3D models, textures and scripts, does not sit on the blockchain but on a distributed network of content servers. The software is maintained by the non-profit Decentraland Foundation; 2024 brought a revised white paper 2.0 and a new desktop app.

What sets Decentraland apart from a normal online game

In an ordinary online game, items belong to the publisher and you only get a right of use. In Decentraland, land and many items sit as tokens in your wallet and can also be sold outside the world. Holders of MANA, LAND and names decide on rules, budgets and content in a DAO. That sounds like more freedom for users. In practice, however, it also means that the value of these tokens depends almost entirely on whether people want to visit the world.

MANA token: currency, voting right and a supply of 2.19 billion

MANA is an ERC-20 token, a standard token on Ethereum that any common wallet can manage. It serves two purposes in Decentraland. First, you use it to pay on the in-house marketplace for land, names, avatar clothing and emotes. Second, every MANA in your wallet counts as one vote in the DAO.

According to CoinGecko, around 1.96 billion MANA are in circulation as of mid-November 2026, with total supply at around 2.19 billion tokens. No new MANA are being created. The DAO receives part of the supply not yet in circulation via a ten-year vesting contract that, according to Naavik, releases 222 million MANA in total. How such release schedules affect the price is explained in our piece on tokenomics.

How MANA was originally burned

In the first white paper, LAND could only be bought with MANA, and the tokens paid were burned. Burning means sending tokens to an address from which they can never be moved again, so the available supply shrinks. Later fees, for example for new names, were also burned for a long time. Marketplace fees of 2.5 percent now flow to the DAO, which uses them to fund grants for developers, events and content. For holders this means that an ongoing mechanism to reduce supply is no longer at the core of the model.

Ethereum MANA and Polygon MANA

Because transactions on Ethereum have at times cost several dollars, much of the marketplace runs on Polygon, a network with significantly lower fees. According to the documentation, you buy land and names with MANA on Ethereum, but most wearables and emotes with MANA on Polygon. If you buy MANA on an exchange, you should therefore check which network the withdrawal goes to. A withdrawal over the wrong network is one of the most common user errors.

LAND parcels: 90,601 NFT plots in Genesis City

The heart of Decentraland is a map called Genesis City, divided into 90,601 square parcels. Each parcel is an NFT, a non-fungible token under the ERC-721 standard. Unlike MANA, each piece is unique: it has fixed coordinates on the map and its own owner. Several adjacent parcels can be merged into an estate, which is also an NFT.

A large part of the map is not in private hands. Roads, plazas and themed districts were reserved at launch or allocated to communities. The team auctioned the remaining parcels for MANA in 2017 and 2018. Since then, land only changes hands on the secondary market, either on the Decentraland marketplace or on large NFT platforms.

What gives land in a virtual world its value

The logic behind LAND is the same as in real estate: location, location, location. A parcel next to a popular plaza gets more visitors and suits advertising, shops or events. This is precisely where a weakness lies that critics have pointed out for years. Avatars in Decentraland can teleport to any point on the map, so walking routes hardly matter. The neighbourhood thus loses part of its value. On top of that, while the number of parcels is fixed, there are countless other virtual worlds that also sell land, such as The Sandbox.

How sharply prices have swung is shown by an analysis by the games industry service Naavik from October 2022. It found that the average sale price of a parcel fell from just under $9,845 to $2,418, while marketplace trading volume collapsed from $22 million in December 2021 to around $879,000 in August 2022. More recent surveys of similar depth are lacking; the direction has not reversed since.

Renting out and building on LAND

If you own a parcel, you can build on it yourself, grant building rights to a developer or rent it out via the marketplace. Building is done with a free builder tool or with code. On your plot, you decide which scene visitors see. There is no right to visitors.

Wearables, emotes and NAMEs: the marketplace beyond land trading

Besides LAND there are three other types of token that play a bigger role in the everyday life of the world than the land itself. Wearables are clothing and accessories for your avatar, emotes are movements and gestures, such as a dance. Both are submitted by designers as collections, reviewed by a DAO committee and then sold as NFTs. They are almost always traded on Polygon, so buying and transferring them costs only cents.

NAMEs are unique avatar names, technically subdomains of dcl.eth in the Ethereum Name Service. A new name costs 100 MANA. A name counts as 100 votes in the DAO and can also point to a separate world outside Genesis City in which you can build without owning LAND.

Decentraland DAO: how voting power comes from MANA, LAND and NAMEs

A DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) is a community that decides by token votes and whose decisions are partly executed directly via smart contracts. In Decentraland, the DAO manages the rules of the world, the list of banned names, the wearables committee and a MANA treasury from which it awards grants.

According to the Decentraland DAO user guide, the weight of your vote depends on your holdings at the moment a proposal is submitted:

• 1 MANA counts as 1 vote (voting power, VP for short), including in wrapped form.
• 1 NAME counts as 100 VP.
• 1 LAND parcel counts as 2,000 VP, an estate according to the number of its parcels.

Voting takes place on the Snapshot platform, which records votes without transaction costs. A proposal goes through several stages. According to the guide, a poll needs 500,000 VP in support, a draft one million, and a full governance proposal six million. Because a few large holders concentrate a lot of voting weight, some proposals pass with a handful of wallets. If you want a say with small holdings, you can delegate your votes to a delegate.

Metaverse user numbers: why the figures diverge so widely

The most debated figure about Decentraland is the number of daily visitors, and it is also the least certain. In October 2022, the analytics firm DappRadar reported that on a single day only 38 users had triggered a transaction on Decentraland's contracts. The project countered that around 8,000 people were active in the world every day. Both figures can be true at the same time. DappRadar counts wallets that do something on the blockchain, such as buying or selling. Anyone who just walks around, attends a concert or chats leaves no trace there.

The 2022 Naavik analysis cites 300,000 monthly and 18,000 daily users for December 2021; by summer 2022, the daily figure was around 7,800. For 2026, there is no independent count of comparable depth. Current reports describe daily visitors in the low four digits, without a disclosed methodology. For a world with a market value of a good €120 million, that is little. Our own prediction section also rates daily user numbers in November 2026 as sobering.

How to read on-chain data and visitor numbers

On-chain data show transactions that are publicly recorded on the blockchain. What they measure is trading, not playing time. Visitor numbers, by contrast, are usually only provided by the operator itself. When you assess Decentraland or another metaverse project, it pays to look at both: if trading volume and visitors stay low for months, demand for LAND and wearables lacks a foundation. We examined a similar case in 2023 with the business model of Upland.

MANA price in review: from the 2021 record high to November 2026

When Facebook renamed itself Meta in October 2021, interest in virtual worlds surged. According to CoinGecko, MANA reached its all-time high of around $5.85 on November 25, 2021. On November 13, 2026, MANA costs around $0.068, or €0.061, a good 98 percent less. Over the year, the loss is just under 70 percent, the market value is around €120 million, and MANA now ranks only around 214th among the largest crypto assets.

The causes are layered. The overall crypto market is weak in November 2026, and metaverse tokens are among the sectors that have been losing the longest since the hype. Big brands that bought space or hosted events in 2021 and 2022 have gone quieter. And because MANA is mainly needed for purchases in a world with few visitors, there is no ongoing demand that could support the price.

Bull case and bear case for MANA

Optimists point out that Decentraland has been running without interruption for six years, is open source, has its own DAO treasury and is making entry easier with new desktop software. If demand for virtual meeting places returns, Decentraland would have a head start over new projects. Sceptics counter that large gaming platforms without tokens have prevailed, that LAND loses scarcity through teleporting and unlimited competition, and that without rising visitor numbers there will be no lasting demand for MANA. Both views are opinions; which one prevails cannot be proven today.

Risks with MANA and LAND: liquidity, concentration and platform dependence

Before buying, you should know three risks. The first is liquidity, that is, how quickly you can sell something at a fair price. MANA trades on many exchanges, whereas a single LAND parcel may find no buyer for weeks. The second risk is concentration. A considerable share of MANA and LAND sits with a few large holders who can strongly influence price and votes. The third risk is dependence on the platform itself: a plot of land is only worth as much as the world it sits in. If Decentraland keeps losing visitors or developers, the NFT also loses usefulness, even though it technically stays in your wallet.

Then there are the usual dangers of NFT trading: fake collections with similar names, phishing sites posing as marketplaces, and smart contract approvals that attackers can use to drain tokens from a wallet. Use a separate wallet for LAND and names that you do not use for everyday experiments, and compare a collection's contract address with the official documentation.

Buying MANA: exchange, MiCA licence and wallet

The easiest way to buy MANA is through a crypto exchange or a broker that lists the token. In the EU, any provider that brokers or holds crypto assets needs authorisation under the European crypto regulation MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets); in Germany, for example, the transitional period for existing providers expired at the end of 2025. Whether a provider is authorised can be checked in the public register of the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA). Pay attention to the exact company name under which the authorisation was granted.

If you only want exposure to the MANA price, you can leave the tokens on the exchange. If you want to buy LAND, names or wearables or vote in the DAO, you need your own wallet that can handle Ethereum and Polygon. Make sure you use the right network when transferring and keep your recovery phrase offline. A hardware wallet is worthwhile above all if you hold valuable parcels or larger amounts of MANA.

How gains on MANA, LAND and other NFTs are taxed depends on your country of residence; crypto tax software helps you record every swap with its date and price.

Decentraland at $0.07: the world runs, the visitors are missing

Technically, Decentraland has delivered what it promised in 2017: an open world in which land and items belong to users and a DAO sets the rules. Economically, it still lacks the mass of visitors that would give MANA and LAND lasting demand. If you want to engage with the project anyway, here is how to proceed:

1. Before every purchase, check whether your exchange has a MiCA licence, and compare MANA fees in our overview of regulated crypto exchanges.
2. Set up a separate wallet for LAND, names and wearables that supports Ethereum and Polygon; suitable apps are listed in our software wallet comparison.
3. Record every swap of MANA for an NFT with date and price, and have the list evaluated by one of the crypto tax tools.

(As of November 13, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)