Swap MANA at the Best Rate

What is MANA?

MANA is an ERC-20 token that works as money inside Decentraland: avatars, wearables, names and LAND parcels are priced in it, and burning it was the original way to claim LAND. Decentraland itself is a 3D world assembled from a finite grid of parcels owned as NFTs, and it has been run by its community since opening to the public in February 2020.

The project was co-founded by Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano. Its August 2017 token sale collected 86,260 ETH, about 25 million dollars at the time, from more than 2,000 buyers at a price of 0.024 dollars per token.

How MANA works

Marketplace activity mostly settles on Polygon, where an official child version of MANA exists through the Polygon PoS bridge, and the DAO subsidizes gas for many purchases so users can trade wearables without holding the network's gas token. The Ethereum contract remains the root; balances move between the two networks over the bridge.

In the DAO, votes are stake-weighted. One MANA counts as one unit of voting power, a NAME counts as 100 and a LAND parcel as 2,000, with balances read at the moment a proposal is created. Voting itself happens on the DAO's governance site and costs no gas.

MANA supply and tokenomics

The 2017 sale distributed 40% of an initial 2.8 billion supply, while 20% was reserved for community incentives, 20% for the team and early contributors, and 20% for the organization itself. LAND auctions then burned the MANA that bidders spent, destroying more than 600 million tokens, which is why total supply sits near 2.19 billion.

MANA is no longer burned at that scale. Today the token functions mainly as the marketplace's unit of account and as a store of DAO voting power, and there is no ongoing issuance.

Who builds MANA

Development is stewarded by the Decentraland Foundation, which acts on behalf of the community, while the DAO owns the core smart contracts, including the LAND registry, estates, wearables and the marketplace. Changes to those contracts, and grants from the DAO treasury, pass through community votes rather than through the Foundation alone.

What people use MANA for

MANA's day-to-day role is commerce inside the world, with governance layered on top for holders who want a say in how Decentraland evolves.

• Buy or sell LAND, estates, wearables and names in the marketplace.
• Vote in the Decentraland DAO with MANA-weighted voting power.
• Fund creators through DAO grants decided by the community.
• Move MANA between Ethereum and Polygon over the official bridge.

MANA risks and considerations

MANA's usefulness is tied to activity in one virtual world, and DAO decisions concentrate around large holders of MANA, LAND and NAMEs. Marketplace commerce depends on the Polygon child token, which inherits the security assumptions of the Polygon PoS bridge.

Several networks list tokens named MANA that Decentraland never deployed. The tokens covered here are the Ethereum original at 0x0f5d2fb29fb7d3cfee444a200298f468908cc942 and the Polygon child token recorded in Decentraland's own contract index; treat anything else with caution.