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Team and partners
Esteban Ordano - CEO and CTO: seasoned engineer, he co-founded Zeppelin Solutions and led the team that created Streamium, the first application that implemented payment channels, a crucial technology for scaling up payments in chain. As a former software engineer at BitPay, he co-created one of the main Bitcoin infrastructure libraries, known as Bitcore. He was also part of the teams behind Copay (a bitcoin wallet) and Insight (a bitcoin blockchain API).
Esteban spent his training years participating in olympiads in mathematics and computer science, investing two summers to work as a software engineering intern at Google.
Ariel Meilich - Project Manager: With experience in venture capital and data analysis, Ariel worked as an analyst at Charles River Ventures, a large venture capital fund in Silicon Valley.
Before entering the world of technology, he spent two years as a National Institute of Health fellow, conducting neuroscience research on human decision-making, while running a BPO agency that supplied clients such than Amazon and General Electric.
Manuel Araoz - member of the board of directors: with a well-established reputation in the field of cryptocurrencies, Manuel is the co-founder and technical director of Zeppelin Solutions, the leader in security in smart-contracts. Thanks to their verified smart contracts, organizations like Brave, Golem and Blockchain Capital have raised more than $ 250 million. Manuel is known as the creator of Proof Of Existence, the first non-financial blockchain-based application. He was also technical manager at Bitpay, Copay and Insight.
Yemel Jardi - member of the board of directors: seasoned blockchain developer, he worked on ChangeTip by building a micro-payment infrastructure for the web, before it was acquired by Airbnb in 2016. Before that, he was a software engineer at BitPay (the main Bitcoin payment processor) where he designed some of the open source tools most used by Bitcoin developers around the world, such as the Bitcore library. Yemel is also a professor in cryptocurrency mining at the Technological Institute of Buenos Aires and president of the South American Business Forum.
The team is also made up of many developers such as: Matias Bargas, Federico Miras, Hugo Arregui, Agustin Mendez, Mario Sossich and Ariel Barmat.
Regarding Decentraland's partners, they are not numerous but are nevertheless of remarkable quality:
- HTC: on February 26, 2019, the Decentraland team announced on its blog a partnership with HTC. It will be possible to buy, sell and manage the LANDs acquired via EXODUS 1, the next HTC phone implementing blockchain technology. This partnership therefore opens the doors to a potentially future collaboration for the porting of the game on the company's virtual reality devices.
- Binance: the possibility of being able to buy LANDs with BINANCE Coin is a major advantage. This increases the quantity of potential buyers and offers better visibility to the project.
Advantages
- The project is progressing well and the team is still active. The possibility of buying LANDs with Binance Coin is not negligible, it is an option that allows more people to be interested in the platform.
- The team supporting the project is rather qualified. Most of them are former engineers who have worked on major projects in the crypto system. It is a strength that Decentraland allows itself to have and which strongly participates in the development of the idea and its realization.
- According to the Entertainment Software Association, consumers spent $ 36 billion in the video game industry in 2017. In addition, CCS Insight predicts that 121 million virtual reality headsets will be sold by 2022, up from 22 million in 2018. The sector is developing rapidly and this could allow the arrival of many new players for Decentraland.
Disadvantages
- There are many potential competitors in Decentraland. We can cite Neoland but especially High Fidelity, a virtual world working with the EOS blockchain. The fact that the virtual reality sector is growing can also be a disadvantage for the Decentraland team.
- Games inspired by Minecraft and trying to reproduce its gameplay are posted online continuously. It will be difficult for Decentraland to fare well and find a place among the many Minecraft-like. Even if the system is based on blockchain and owning a virtual field, the biggest challenge is to attract players and convince them to invest in LANDs.
My opinion on Decentraland (MANA)
With such a talented and promising team, the risks of a bitter failure of the Decentraland project are low. However, being based on the blockchain, the fluctuations in the interest that players can take in its applications can be significant from one month to another. If the technology continues to democratize and the developers are still working as hard on the project, there should be no major obstacles to their success.
The partnership with Binance Coin highlights the work of the team and gives a new lease of life to the LAND market linked to Decentraland. In addition, the project has moved closer to HTC, who should be remembered, is one of the leaders in the sale of virtual reality headsets with its HTC VIVE. The partnership is currently only linked to the brand's next phone, but that suggests that the offer could extend to the virtual reality branch of it.
Only downside, the amount of games of this type on the market is important and the competition is fierce. Decentraland will have to stand out from these by offering unique innovations other than the use of the blockchain within its system to accommodate all types of players.
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