Opportunities:
The idea of creating a virtual world in VR and interacting in it is very interesting and should draw a lot of interest.
The project has been under development since 2015.
Since land is scarce, if Decentraland is popular, then MANA and LAND will become very valuable, just like land in the real world.
The team has partnerships with other promising projects such as district0x and Aragon.
Concerns:
This seems like a very complex project, with different applications being able to run on the platform.
Unlike some other ICOs, this project does not actually solve a problem. It is just creating a game that people may potentially want, depending on how entertaining it is.
Decentraland is essentially a game but no one on the team has gaming experience. Developing a successful game is very difficult – 99.9% of mobile games are unprofitable. It took even Rovio 51 failures before their success in Angry Birds.
I believe the team has the technical expertise, but I am not sure if they have the relevant experience needed to create a successful game.
Decentraland needs an active community to stay alive (and for land to be valuable). Even if the project is a hit initially, all games will eventually go out-of-favor and players will leave – virtually no game can maintain its popularity for over 10 years. People will eventually get bored and leave the system.
Conclusion:
Overall, I am neutral about this ICO from an investment perspective. It is a very interesting project – I am sure it will be a fun game to play in.
However, so many things need to be done right (both in terms of software development and on the entertainment side) for this project to be a success. I’m not sure if the team is able to do it given their lack of experience in the video game industry.
Our thoughts of the tokens for short term and long term are as follows:
For short-term holding:
Not good. The execution of the ICO so far has been poor - 1) increasing the hard cap by $5 million, 2) canceling the whitelist because there is a scam going on? It doesn't make any sense to me.
For long-term holding:
Neutral. For MANA to appreciate, there needs to be an active community using the platform and finding it entertaining. On one hand, this idea seems very interesting, but on the other hand, I am not sure about the team’s capability to build a successful game given no previous background in the video game industry.
