On the Decentraland Marketplace, that’s just enough for some creepy eyes or a scary mouth to add to my avatar-customized using a limited but very Nintendo-esque menu system-but just short of the 90 needed for a very snazzy umbrella hat. You'll also need to set up a MetaMask wallet in which to store your MANA, enabling you to buy and sell items in the game's marketplace. The cryptocurrency is listed on exchanges such as Binance for trading, but the easiest way to obtain it is to buy it directly using an exchange like Coinbase or Gemini. Of course, if you want to actually take advantage of the world's unique selling point-digital ownership-you'll need to get your hands on some MANA. You can also switch between first- and third-person views by pressing V. Once you've arrived in the virtual world, a small flying robot explains the basics, but anyone who’s played a first-person shooter will be familiar with the basic controls: your keyboard’s W, A, S and D buttons control lateral movement, the mouse moves your eyes and the space bar makes you jump. Visiting Decentraland is simply a case of heading to the Decentraland site, checking a box to confirm you're of legal age and agree to the T&Cs, and clicking "start exploring". The platform is web-based (although it doesn’t yet work on mobile devices), so you can be standing in the middle of Gemini Plaza as a guest user within a couple of minutes.
You don't actually need to spend a penny or download a thing to begin exploring Decentraland. Using Decentraland's MANA cryptocurrency, you can buy in-game items, LAND-or even a snappy name for yourself, if you prefer not to be known as Guest-7b1b3c. The Decentraland game world is split up into 90,000 units of LAND (a non-fungible token, or NFT), all of which were snapped up when they were originally auctioned off-although there’s a marketplace where people can buy or sell it.