Decentraland Foundation Quarterly Update: Q1 2023

By Decentraland, , in Announcements

Overall, Q1 of 2023 was one of the Foundation’s most productive and impactful quarters since the launch of Decentraland in 2020. In preparation for one of our virtual world’s biggest events of the year, MVFW23, the Decentraland Foundation focused on improving the platform's stability and performance to provide a better user experience and saw meaningful results. Additionally, Worlds continued to be developed and improved with more plans for enhancement coming in Q2. During this time Foundation teams also released tons of new features and products such as SDK 7.

In Q1, awareness of Decentraland grew significantly due to MVFW23 with the event drawing in thousands of new users and associated media pieces receiving an estimated 7.5 million views. The event itself served as a great opportunity to shine a spotlight on creators with DCL natives claiming the most visited scene and top sold Wearable titles during the event. 

The Decentraland Foundation's objectives remain strong and aligned with the 2023 Manifesto, with a focus on empowering content creators, making Decentraland more fun, and improving performance and stability. In Q2, Game Jams, Hackathons, and tentpole events will inspire creators, SDK 7 and the Editor will keep evolving forward, making creating in Decentraland more inclusive for non-coders, and the Foundation’s dev teams will continue to add new enhancing features to the DCL user experience. There’s nothing but improvements ahead of us!

The following highlights the progress made in Q1 and showcases the exciting new features and enhancements that have been implemented as well as giving a preview of what’s coming next in Q2:

2023 Quarter 1 Updates

Marketing & Partnerships

Community Engagement & Creator Support

  • Weekly Wearable Wednesdays were started on Twitter to showcase Decentraland’s amazing creators and bring their creations to life while creating a space to discuss Wearable fashion and creation in DCL

  • The Film Club contest engaged the community to create videos showing the world what they best loved about Decentraland and the submissions were shown at Decentraland’s 3rd Birthday Party while the Runway Ready Emote Contest enticed Emote creators to make new moves for MVFW23

  • Over 50 new creators were onboarded in Q1 by working with MVFW23 partners such as IoDF, The Fabricant, Altr and others

  • The Foundation worked with studio partners to help launch over 20 large scale activations including the second year of the Australian Tennis Open, Buxom Cosmetics, Pedigree Foster Dog campaign, Amorepacific, Doritos’ Superbowl campaign, plus amazing fashion activations during MVFW23 from brands such as adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, Alo, and more.

Supporting Platform-Enriching Events

  • MVFW is one of Decentraland’s largest events, this year attracting 26K visitors over 4 days, 50% of which were new users! The Foundation’s Marketing team supported and amplified this event on social media, worked with the media to spread the word, and created multiple informative blog posts and daily newsletters to guide event attendees.

Spreading Awareness of Decentraland

  • Members of the Foundation participated in countless Twitter Spaces, attended panel talks, gave interviews and worked with the press to spread the word of MVFW23 and awareness of Decentraland. Their efforts resulted in 100+ pieces of media coverage from the likes of Vogue, Forbes, and others, receiving an estimated 7.5 million views.

  • The Foundation hosted a small irl MVFW23 event during Paris Blockchain Week with fashion themed panel discussions with brands, creators and community members including Monnier Paris, Rtly, Gira Studios, and MetaTokyo

Support

New dedicated Support & Moderation Team

  • A new dedicated support team was launched in Q1 to enhance the user experience across the platform. This team is currently operating 16 hours per day, 7 days a week and the Decentraland community can receive support via email, chat, and social channels, such as Discord, Telegram, and Reddit. 

Discord: https://dcl.gg/discord

Live Chat: https://intercom.decentraland.org/

Email: hello@decentraland.org

Increased Support Visibility

  • Support is now easier to find than ever. Live chat support can be found on the majority of Decentraland’s web pages and within the Explorer, currently accessible via the settings menu on both web and desktop clients. The team also experimented by adding a support button on the scene during MVFW23. 

Trust & Safety

  • A ticketing solution was added to Decentraland’s Discord, to allow the support team to help users with complex or financially sensitive issues more easily. Scams are a massive threat to everyone in the crypto space, so this particular feature is very effective in combating them. 

Progress so Far

  • Over 10,000 support interactions were completed during Q1, with the peak of traffic occurring during MVFW23 and current satisfaction levels are above 90%.

For Creators

SDK 7 Beta 

  • SDK 7 went into Beta, fixing a lot of bugs and introducing minor improvements that made it a much more stable and usable tool.

  • Documentation was updated to include a full auto-generated reference of everything in the SDK.

Decentraland Editor

  • The Decentraland Editor was released as a stable product, becoming the recommended tool for all content creators.

  • During Q1, work has continued on the Editor. Great progress has been made on the next stage of the Decentraland Editor with plans to release it in Q2.

GLTFast Importer

  • Launched GLTFast importer on desktop with exciting new features packed with benefits like vertex animation and vertex color for content creators.

Improved Navigation in Builder

  • A new ‘Overview’ tab was added to provide a quick glance at what the Builder can do, navigation was streamlined across Collections for easy management, error handling was improved, and ‘Empty State’ on Mobile was clarified. 

Worlds

Livekit for Communications and Voice Chat

  • Added support for Livekit for communications and voice chat in Worlds.

World NAME operators

  • Enable content creators to upload scenes under their NAMEs. 

Web and Desktop (Windows and MacOS) clients

Performance Improvements

  • Reached all-time stability highs in the last 18 months with almost 95% of desktop sessions and 65% of web sessions running smoothly without major hiccups.

  • Decreased loading time by almost 50%, from a slow 40 seconds to a lightning-fast 22 seconds.

  • Increased average FPS (frames per second) from 25 to 30 on the web client and from 45 to 65 on the desktop client.

Enhanced Chat

  • The in world chat now supports @mentions and visually differentiates between NAME, wallet, and guest players' name tags.

  • 2 out of every 100 messages sent today contain a mention.

Improved Friend Request Flow

  • The new friend request flow, including introductory messages, has proven to be much more efficient, resulting in 2 out of every 3 friend requests being accepted, improving from the previous 1/4.

New Profile

  • The new profile format (formerly called Passport) has increased the number of profiles visited by 3 times, and the fact that it displays the Wearables a person owns with links to get your own in the Marketplace has resulted in over 5k more Wearable sales made every month.

New Tutorial release for new users

  • Launched a long-awaited, new first time user tutorial experience which led to a great improvement in tutorial completion rate further resulting in the global drop-off rate decreasing by 5%. 

Marketplace

Revamped Look and Feel

  • It is now easier to discover items thanks to the new layout and filters, and the Marketplace is much faster with a 10x loading time improvement.

  • More mobile-friendly, paving the way for increased user adoption.

Improved Filtering

  • Added many filters like ‘Rental Period and Price’, ‘Distance from a Plaza’, and ‘Adjacent to Road’ for LANDs and a ‘Creator’ filter for Wearables & Emotes to make it easier for users to discover the Decentraland assets they need in the Marketplace.

  • Added filtering for LANDs and Estates in map view.

More Accessible and Inclusive

  • Shoppers can now purchase Items and LAND from the Marketplace without needing crypto by paying directly with their debit and credit card, or they can add MANA to their account with card or bank transfer.

Catalysts

Smart Contracts Validation

  • Added the ability to use smart contracts instead of The Graph to validate the creation of Emotes, NAMEs, Wearables, and Scenes, enabling catalyst owners to choose different providers to validate the content that is stored on the servers and thus help the platform be more resilient and fault-tolerant.

Fast Bootstrapping

  • Decreased the technical resources consumption and time needed to reboot a Catalyst from 30 to 6 minutes.

Roadmap for Quarter 2

Unleash Content Creators' Creativity

Community Contests

Game Jams & Hackathons are planned for the upcoming months to encourage the community to build amazing things and help support the growth of new creators. Keep a lookout for more news!

SDK 7 Updates

New Libraries (ECS Utils, UI Utils, and NPC Utils) will be migrated, providing content creators with a more efficient development experience. The SDK 7 update to come will also include avatar animations controlled by the scene, bug fixes, enhanced ray casting, and video streaming improvements.

Decentraland Editor

The next version of the Editor will allow creators (even those who can’t code!) to drag and drop objects into a scene, combining the power of SDK 7 with no-code tools to create amazing experiences.

Marketplace & Builder Enhancements

Focus will be given on improving navigation, the feature of creating custom lists for saving items in the Marketplace, and streamlined deployment of Worlds from the Builder with the inclusion of new scene templates. Single sign-on will also become available for smoother navigation across dApps like the Builder, Marketplace, and Genesis City.

Make Decentraland More Fun

Amplification of Events

In the month of June, Beauty Week & Pride Month, both large tentpole events, will be organized by Cult Beauty and Polygonal Mind respectively, but as always all of the DCL community is invited to add their own events and builds to the festivities. The Foundation Marketing and Partnerships teams will support and amplify these events to help bring in as many visitors as possible.

Backpack Redesign

It will be possible to inspect avatars, take high-resolution screenshots, manage Wearables, and access a closet in stores to equip outfits quickly.

My Account Section

Enhanced digital identity with more detailed profile information, name changes, and privacy preferences is coming.

Favorites and Places 2.0

It will soon be possible to save and revisit your favorite locations with ease! Places will showcase every location instead of a limited, curated selection. Discoverability will be boosted with search functionality in both the Explorer and the Places dApp.

Quests

Groundwork will continue on this feature which will result in the possibility to create engaging quests, with a public release planned for later this year.

A New and Improved Decentraland Homepage

A stunning new home page featuring dynamic sections to spotlight news, Events, Places, and must-have Marketplace items is in the works with the intention of making the homepage more informative for both returning and new users.

Genesis Plaza Revamp

Teams will work on overhauling Genesis Plaza’s design, including new game mechanics to host fun experiences.

Improving Performance and Stability

Foundations for New Clients

Part of the dev team will kickstart a long-term investment into investigating the development of a new architecture that addresses long-standing issues with the current Reference Client design. The goal is to increase performance, reduce loading times, and enable portability to mobile and VR.

Skybox Shader

Some complexities with the skybox shader are being tackled which will decrease the amount of time it takes to render the skybox.

Toon Shader

To ensure avatars can render everything a complex shader is being worked on. This is being simplified to bring more performance gains with the same fidelity.

Memory Duplication

To ensure that the user-generated content that is delivered is memory efficient, the Foundation is working on ensuring textures, assets, & materials are efficiently shared.

At the same time, the response time of several APIs on the Catalysts and Content Servers are being improved aiming to reach the ambitious target of a 99.99 percentile of all response time to be below 2 seconds.

Desktop Client

In the upcoming months, the MacOS version of the reference client will be moved out of beta to support auto-update and remove security notifications from the operating system.

Closing

We are thrilled about what’s been accomplished in Q1 and excited for what’s coming in Q2 and we hope you are too! Decentraland is continually building as a platform that gets better every day and the projects being worked on now, such as the SDK 7 & Editor plus the continued growth of Worlds are big game changers. The Foundation is, as always, strongly committed to making Decentraland the best it can be while supporting the DCL community to achieve great things together. We can’t wait to share more about the new features we’re working on for you!

We hope you enjoy these updates and continue to explore, create, and connect within Decentraland. Thank you for your continued support and engagement—stay tuned for more exciting developments in the near future, and thank you for being part of the vibrant Decentraland community!