Angzaar Outpost: A Marketplace Within Decentraland’s Genesis City
By Decentraland DAO, , in Community Highlights
One of the most studied aspects of a blockchain-based platform like Decentraland is the opportunity to make clear, recorded purchases. Decentraland’s Marketplace can be found on the official Decentraland webpage, with separate sections for collectibles such as Wearables, Emotes, and NAMEs, and a dedicated section for LAND sales and rentals. But what if you could shop for Decentraland items within Decentraland’s Genesis City itself? So thought the DAO grantees behind the Angzaar Outpost project, and they set to work to make this immersive idea come to life.
A push to merge two tabs into one
When, during 2022, the aptly-named Last Slice Collective, a Web3 creative studio founded by Lastraum, brought forward their grant petition for developing a marketplace within Genesis City, they wrote in their proposal that there was room for evolution in the current state of trade in the Decentraland environment.
The grant petition was clearly outlined, identifying opportunities to enhance the marketplace experience for Decentraland users. In September 2022, the DAO approved and enacted the grant.
https://twitter.com/angzaar/status/1628867914865467393?s=20
In its grand vision, the aim of the marketplace was to seamlessly weave every Decentraland dApp directly into the fabric of the virtual universe and thus replicate the market.decentraland.org landing page inside the game itself. The team behind the project insisted that this feature would help create more immersive experiences. Beyond that, they aspired to cultivate the Angzaar Outpost into a bustling hub for community interaction and commerce. They also outlined three vectors for improvement, specified below:
Enhancing in-game transactions: Historically, purchasing in-game items such as Wearables, Emotes, LAND, and NAMEs, as well as voting for change, required navigating away from the virtual Genesis City environment to Decentraland’s web page. The proposal aimed to refine this process, allowing users to handle all transactions in-world, without interruption.
Empowering creators with storefronts: Creators within Decentraland often found it challenging to showcase their items for sale due to technical complexities and the requirement of owning LAND. This posed a significant barrier for creators who wished to contribute to the growing Decentraland economy. In response, the proposal outlined plans for storefronts, designed to empower creators by providing accessible avenues for displaying and selling their creations.
Elevated immersive multiplayer experiences: The Angzaar Outpost has integrated Audius, a decentralized music platform, Microsoft's Playfab cloud services, and Colyseus multiplayer server layer, creating an immersive multiplayer gaming environment for Decentraland users. Players can listen to and discover hundreds of artists and tracks on the Audius platform for free, and the team has also created their own music specific to Angzaar. Utilizing cloud and multiplayer services, almost everything in the scene is enabled for multiplayer. As such, if someone “teleports” to a different location in Angzaar, other players can see it. Players can also fend off Angzaar enemies, complete quests, and harvest resources together.
Promoting community-driven innovation in the DAO: The proposal also identified an opportunity to stimulate community-driven innovation within the DAO. Historically, despite the scale and complexity of the Decentraland, much of the platform's innovation was reliant on the efforts of the Decentraland Foundation. The proposal sought to engage more community members as active participants, sharing the responsibility for further growth and development with the broader Decentraland community.
The most promising aspect of an in-world marketplace might be supporting the growth of the DAO's creative community. Since Decentraland is built upon an open protocol where the community can propose ideas to expand, improve, or even create alternate versions, such as a 2D DCL experience, and since creators and suppliers are, more than ever before, provided the opportunity to showcase themselves, it’s reasonable to infer that an in-world marketplace would help the community interact and come up with new ideas altogether. For example, Last Slice Collective even used technology from Atlas Corp—another DAO grantee—in their development of Angzaar Outpost. These interactions are set to become a standard with an in-world marketplace up and running.
https://twitter.com/angzaar/status/1661356381591465984?s=20
In addition to these key improvement vectors, the proposal also envisioned the repurposing of one of Decentraland's many plazas into a vast 20×20 parcel—the same size as Genesis Plaza—marketplace, fostering a more immersive and efficient user experience. This initiative was set to be driven by a dedicated team of creators who shared the vision for a thriving and interactive Decentraland.
A vast in-world marketplace
Once the proposal was enacted, the Decentraland ecosystem underwent a significant change. The allocated LAND was redesigned entirely and revitalized. The new location was christened Angzaar Outpost, a name that brings up both a cryptically alluring Unicode character and a shorthand reference to a bazaar. The outpost is already live and ready to visit at (0,-82).
Angzaar’s circular layout indeed resembles a bazaar. Amid a sandy landscape, it looks almost like a glyph itself: The marketplace seems inspired both by the sun-bleached city of Arrakeen from the sci-fi masterpiece Dune (1965) and the makeshift ghost town of the desert-based Burning Man festival.
The architectural design team acknowledged this influence and cited yet more cultural references as part of their inspiration, such as classic RPGs like RuneScape and EverQuest. In terms of organizing the vast amount of content present in the space, they looked to Kevin Lynch's five elements of a city, a 1960 concept which brought up pathways, districts, edges, landmarks, and nodes as crucial parts of an urban settlement. The team also cited Ebenezer Howard's garden city planning as fruitful guidance. These influences helped shape the macro-level architectural approach taken to masterplan the market's layout, which covers an area equivalent to “26 football fields.”
The dev team has already placed 200 market NPCs to interact with shoppers among the small city of tents. Each tent works as a storefront and emulates each unique URL on the Decentraland Marketplace page. This infrastructure even allowed the Angzaar Outpost to be part of 2023’s Metaverse Fashion Week.
The Angzaar Outpost experience
With invaluable help from both the DAO and the Foundation, who renewed the project’s LAND lease, the team behind Angzaar has made significant strides in the development process. Most recently, they have successfully integrated features for primary and secondary sales of Wearables, Emotes, LAND, and NAMEs directly into the Genesis City environment, offering shoppers an additional option to the Marketplace webpage.
Moreover, the team established a Clone Player Character (CPC) machine within The Angzaar Outpost. This machine allows players to “clone” their in-game avatars, creating a permanent presence within the Genesis City. These clones, clad in the same Wearables as the players' avatars, can be placed as idle or given a path to follow within the scene. These CPCs are extensions of players’ digital identities with custom dialogs, links to other Decentraland scenes, outbound links to websites and social media, and future giveaways and quests. Players can turn their CPC into a new kind of marketing for themselves, their work, or their Decentraland scene.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1676599311579201537
Simultaneously, the team has initiated tests on the functionality of a new mini-game named Byte Runner. They have also started incorporating CCBs, or community code blocks, into the scene.
How to participate in Angzaar Outpost’s endeavor
Angzaar Outpost is already running, but there’s still a lot to continue expanding on and Last Slice can do with the community’s contributions. Join the Outpost’s Discord, or follow Angzaar on Twitter for more news. Moreover, pay the Outpost a visit in Decentraland, trade, and tell the dev team about your experience. As the original proposal from
The metaverse is full of yet unrecognized potential and opportunities. Do you have an idea that could benefit the Decentraland community? Learn more about the DAO’s grants here.
Do you know of a cool Decentraland community project that you think should be next in the Community Highlights series? Contact the Decentraland Foundation team @decentraland on Twitter.
Disclaimer: The service described in this article was not developed or audited by the Decentraland Foundation. Always be careful when engaging in any kind of transaction. Decentraland is not responsible for any loss of funds/assets.