As Quarter 2 of 2023 has come to a close, it’s time to take a look at what the Decentraland Foundation was working on, what was accomplished during that time, how the work done measured up to the goals set at the end of the last quarter, and what’s coming up next. In short, it was quite a lot! 

Before diving into the technical details, we’d like to celebrate the new Foundation Executive Director, Yemel Jardi, previously a DAO Committee member, who took over the role from Agustin Ferreira in Q2. Thank you to Agustin for over 4 years of dedicated service and leadership!

Upon accepting the new role, Yemel shared that he was eager to put his experience in the DAO to work, “I see this next step as a great opportunity to utilize the experience I gained from my time with the DAO in guiding Decentraland to the next level. I think this knowledge will be invaluable in enhancing the relationship between the DAO and the Foundation and I look forward to streamlining communication between the two, so we can continue building a free and open platform for the spatial internet together.” With what the Foundation has accomplished since and what is planned for the next quarter, the future looks bright!

Reading through the full report of Foundation activities below, you’ll find that Foundation teams were very busy over the past three months delivering numerous improvements & new features, working to grow awareness of Decentraland, empowering the community, and much more. Staying true to the focus on Decentraland’s creators set in the 2023 Manifesto, creator tools continued to be developed with SDK 7 leaving beta for a full launch and continued improvements to the Editor, shortening the distance to code-free creation.

In the meantime, Worlds, a feature intended for the whole of the Decentraland community, has been made more accessible for a wider range of technical levels. In addition to being deployable via the Builder, which allows for the non-code creation of simple scenes, 4 beautiful templates will now allow even a complete novice to launch their World, ready to use with a spacious home, office, theater, and shortly, a nightclub.

 The entire Decentraland experience has received many updates across the board in Q2. From a revamped homepage, improved Marketplace, to a new version of the Backpack that adds new ways you can use your Wearables, there’s just so much to cover. Jump into the full report to see everything that was accomplished, what has changed, and what you can expect to see next!

• Launched Game Jam '23 which is currently ongoing, closing on July 10. This year, the community is challenged with creating an interactive scene based on the theme ‘Lucid Dreams’ using SDK 7 and AI technology, pushing creators to test the boundaries of these new technologies. 

• Helped to facilitate a partnership between JOMO and Supermind Studios who together with MTV and MetaTokyo created a wellness space in Decentraland for Mental Health Action Day where JOMO NFTs were displayed together with an Emote created by SUPERNINA's studio. As part of the MTV activation, TRU Band Room Stage hosted artists from around the globe over 24 hours. 

• Foundation teams helped to organize the featuring of Decentraland and a few amazing community creators (Doki, Metaskins, Threedium, KJ Walker, and GIRA Studio) on BBC’s Glow Up as they brought the show’s make up artists IRL looks to Metaverse Fashion Week for the adidas runway show.

Metaverse Beauty Week

• Partnered with Cult London to launch the first ever Metaverse Beauty Week, receiving coverage from Forbes, Glossy, High Snobiety, Cosmetics Business, and more highlighting the significance of beauty in digital identity. 

• MBW resulted in brands receiving a 53x higher than the average click through rate for Instagram ads in the beauty industry providing a unique case study for more beauty brands to activate in the metaverse! 

Metaverse Pride

• Unlike events such as MVFW, which attract a large number of curious new users, Metaverse Pride is largely a Web3 celebration enjoyed by the diverse and inclusive Decentraland community, with 80% of attendees being DCL account holders (signed in with a crypto wallet). Organized in collaboration with two community studios, Polygonal Mind and Vegas City, the Foundation supported the festival and helped to oversee and communicate about its events.

• To boost community engagement, a Pride Wearable Contest was hosted before the big event. Congratulations to all of the winners! To top that off, 800 Wearables were purchased during Metaverse Pride, generating over $6K in revenue for Decentraland creators.  

• Decentraland creators organized 11 events and designed 11 flamboyant floats in a 24/7 Pride Parade organized by community studio Vegas City. Those attending the Pride parade racked up 7K sessions, while across the festival they spent a total of 1.7K hours immersed in games, virtual art installations, and music performances. Just at the AdCouncil booth alone, 6K visits were logged during the 3-day event.

• High profile press placements featuring Metaverse Pride include: Decrypt and Decential, as well as a Crypto Cafe podcast in which Randi Zuckerbergand spoke with Metaverse Pride Producer Iara Dias about the event. 

• A completely revamped Decentraland homepage was released as a joint effort of multiple Foundation teams. The updated main page showcases Decentraland’s main features in an attractive and easy-to-understand way that benefit newcomers as well as featuring top Events, Places, and Wearables from the community.

• In Q2, members of the Foundation hosted and participated in countless Twitter Spaces, attended panel talks, gave interviews, and worked with the press to spread the word about MBW, Metaverse Pride, and generally increase awareness of Decentraland. Their efforts resulted in more than 700 pieces of media coverage from the likes of CNN Paris, Variety, NBC, Vogue Business, Glossy, Cointelegraph, Decrypt, Blockworks, Jing Daily, and others, reaching a mass global audience with more interviews still to be published!

• Additionally, the leadership team at Decentraland was invited to speak at multiple high profile events throughout the quarter and joined other notable brand leaders in discussing the future of the metaverse. Foundation Executive Director, Yemel Jardi participated in the Financial Times Future of Finance and Creative Director, Sam Hamilton spoke at the WWD Tech Symposium. 

• Over the quarter, the Foundation team (in some cases in collaboration with DAO teams) published 13 blog posts showcasing community projects and DCL creators, providing information on product updates, and detailing large scale events in Decentraland to roll out the red carpet for first-time visitors and community members alike. These blogs help to keep the community up to date and aware of new resources while serving as an accessible gateway to Decentraland for newcomers and brands interested in its potential. To this end, recent blogs are now featured on Decentraland’s new homepage which was launched this quarter.

• MANA spent on NAMEs will now go to the DAO to help fund community grants as per this proposal.

• SDK 7 officially launched out of beta and is now a stable version. Over Q2, a large number of improvements and resources for the SDK were worked on:

  • Several example scenes were published to help people get familiar with SDK 7. The examples page can now be filtered by SDK version, difficulty level, and category.

  • Published helper libraries to make working with SDK 7 a lot easier in many common use-cases.

  • Many improvements were made to the stability and performance of both SDK 6 and 7.

  • Improved raycasts, making them a lot more powerful and easier to use than ever before.

  • Added support for configuring colliders on either the visible or invisible geometry of a model, distinguishing between different collider layers, including custom layers.

  • Added the ability to reference entities that were added with the Inspector via code by name. This enables the workflow of combining visual work on the Editor + code.

  • Added support for video events in SDK 7.

  • Included some new components to give information about the context of where the scene is running, like UICanvasInformation and EngineInfo.

  • Included a new GLTLoadingState component to let creators know when a 3D model has finished loading in the engine.

  • Refactored the syntax for pointer events and raycast helpers to make it more intuitive.

  • Refactored the syntax of NFT URNs to make them more future-proof, so other chains and contracts could be supported in the future.

The gif above shows the comparison of the same stress test (1024 updates per frame) in SDK 6 and SDK 7, perfectly illustrating the improved performance SDK 7 can deliver.

• Launched the Inspector as a new Alpha feature to the Editor. This is a huge landmark, as it makes it possible to edit a scene without any code, bringing the Editor one step closer to completely code-free creation. For now this feature allows you to create only static scenes, but the plan is to expand its capabilities by adding more components to the UI. It’s also possible to write code that references what’s created via this interface.

• Included a lot of basic features with the Inspector, including fixed-increment moving, camera settings, auto-save, parenting, sub-tree copying, navigating the old scene Builder’s asset catalog, importing custom assets, etc.

• A lot of work was also done on polishing the experience of using the Inspector and fixing corner case bugs.

• The Builder can now be used to deploy scenes to Worlds from the Builder dApp. No coding needed, just follow the UI prompts and your World will be ready in no time!

• By using the Builder, you will be able to create simple scenes without using code—just drag and drop different scene elements into place. Alternatively, you can use one of 4 new, beautiful templates to set up a ready-to-use World.

• Qualifying Worlds, those owned by LAND owners or rented by their tenants, have been added to the Places page, making them more discoverable with similar features as Places (the ability to be added to your favorites and rated).

• Released the new Backpack that the community loved and which will serve as a base to integrate more exciting new features.

  • The updated version added filters, a sort by and search bar, inventory slots to display equipped Wearables in each category, an improved avatar visualizer with zoom and pan, an info card to inspect Wearable information, and the ability to unhide hidden Wearables, allowing for completely new outfit combinations!

• Added the Saved Outfits feature to the backpack

• Launched a new account and wallet view that allows you to edit your bio and add links as well as switch between different NAMEs.

• Released Favorites for Places which allow you to create a list of your favorite Places, synced between the Explorer and Places page, from which you can easily jump in-world.

• Released Places Automation so that the Places page now will include every Place in Decentraland automatically.

  • This means the Places API is now more robust, and can be built on to add new features in the future.

• Released Performance Improvements

  • The desktop client now experiences 40% less frame rate hiccups, resulting in a smoother experience while average frames per second have been increased from 68 to 75.

• In Quarter 2, the Marketplace received a new layout to improve navigation and discoverability. 

  • The primary and secondary markets were merged, showing buyers one card per item, with all the purchasing options shown on an Item’s page and Creator and Price filters were added. 

  • Now, buyers can find the Wearables and Emotes they’re looking for more easily and can make more informed purchases, choosing to support the original creator by buying from them directly when possible. 

• Wishlists and Personalized Lists were added allowing shoppers to save their favorites as well as curate customized lists and share them with their friends and communities.

• Improved messaging about network connections for better UX. It will now be easier for users to know when to connect to Polygon to perform certain actions like covering the gas fees, and how to get back to the Ethereum network to use the Marketplace.

• A new success page (including confetti!🎉) was added for purchases in MANA

• Enhanced the realm scoring logic to achieve more effective user grouping within Decentraland.

• Introduced fast bootstrapping 2.0: now the Catalyst servers can be patched and restarted within 2 seconds. 

• Optimized the Content Server to ensure that all request responses are delivered within one second or less.

• The Lambdas service has been successfully migrated to a new implementation, and all obsolete and low-performing endpoints have been cleaned up.

A new support button has been added in-world which can be found on the bottom left of your screen. Look for the question mark icon!

Just a reminder, you can always get in touch with support in the following ways:

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

Email: hello@decentraland.org

Discord: https://dcl.gg/discord

The Foundation’s teams have been hard at work empowering creators, supporting community events, delivering powerful creator tools, and improving the Decentraland experience both in-world and out, and we’re not going to stop anytime soon!

Work on a diverse number of new features, products, and events is already underway. We want you to be as excited about them as we are, so here’s a sneak peek of what you can expect over the next three months:

• Hands Wearable Category: A whole new category that will open a world of new possibilities for creators and fashionistas alike.

• Web Scene Editor: An updated way to create scenes from your browser.

• Portable Experiences: Enables the creation of scenes that are not tied to a specific parcel.

• Smart Wearables: Monetize your Portable Experiences as NFTs in the Marketplace.

• Custom Avatar Animations: Experiences will be able to load custom avatar animations so that visitors to a scene will not appear to be standing motionless to other users when they are undertaking a specific action. For example, in a mining game, the scene creator can use this feature to make avatars playing the game appear to swing a pickaxe.

• Decentraland Cast: Will enable low-latency streaming into Decentraland.

• In-World Camera: This feature will provide a native and easy way to position, capture, and share photos in Decentraland.

• Profile dApp: Will make it possible for you to get a link to your Decentraland profile which you can then share on your other social profiles.

• Improved Discoverability: Adding a search function and better categories for Places.

• Avatar VRM Export: Soon you’ll be able to take your unique Decentraland avatar to other platforms using the standard VRM format.

• Foundation teams will focus on performance improvements in the current unity renderer.

• Research on a new client architecture for desktop, mobile, and VR will continue.

Something is always happening in Decentraland! In addition to attending daily and weekly community events, make sure to mark your calendars for these major events coming in the near future.

Metaverse Art Week, 19 - 23 July 2023

The fourth annual Metaverse Art Week returns to Decentraland under the defiant banner of ‘The metaverse is dead. Long live the metaverse’. The event's main attraction, MESH by Vueltta, will showcase 40 immersive new works by 3D, metaverse, and VR creators, together with installations by underground, yet thriving, virtual creative communities. Save the date and look out for more news on this exciting event next week!

Architecture Biennale, 21-24 September 2023 

The first Metaverse Architecture Biennale, ‘Presence of the Future’, will unite top creators worldwide to manifest the significance of architecture and design. Organized by Dearch Space, W3rlds, and Metancy, the 4-day online festival will allow users to explore virtual pavilions designed by top creators and engage in public talks and lectures. 

AI World Fair, October 2023

More details coming soon via Decentraland's newsletter and Discord.

Music Month, November 2023

This year, Decentraland will evolve the annual Metaverse Music Festival into an entire month dedicated to music. This extended celebration will provide an immersive platform for the community to curate and host music-related events. Throughout Music Month, Decentraland will transform into a hub of musical expression, with events spanning a diverse range of genres, performances, and experiences. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months!

If you are interested in participating in one of these events, please complete this form and Foundation team members or event organizers will contact you shortly.

A lot has been accomplished in this past quarter and we hope you have enjoyed all the updates, new features, and improvements that were shipped. The Foundation is committed to providing an ever-improving Decentraland experience in-world and behind the scenes, where talented creators work their magic. When you succeed, we succeed, so the Foundation will continue to work towards empowering creators and providing them with first-class building tools, supporting the organization of exciting and interesting events, and letting the world know that Decentraland is the place to be.

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!