Buy Decentraland

Decentraland is a virtual world that runs on Ethereum, and MANA is the cryptocurrency used inside it. The land, the avatar clothing, the names and most of the other items in the world are held as non-fungible tokens, and the rules of the world are set by token holders voting rather than by a company publishing patch notes.

That structure is the genuinely interesting part of Decentraland, and it is also the honest starting point. MANA was one of the assets that defined the metaverse trade of 2021 and 2022, and the gap between the attention the project attracted then and the number of people actually inside the world has been the standing criticism of it ever since. Our guide to Ethereum covers the network MANA lives on, and our guide to altcoins explains where tokens like MANA sit relative to Bitcoin.

Where did Decentraland come from?

Work on Decentraland began in 2015, led by the Argentine developers Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano. The MANA token sale ran in August 2017 and raised roughly twenty four million US dollars in ether, with the original terms allocating forty percent to sale participants, twenty percent to community incentives, twenty percent to the team, early contributors and advisers, and twenty percent retained by the project.

The world itself did not open to the public until February 2020, nearly three years later. That lag matters as context: MANA traded as a metaverse asset for years before there was a metaverse to walk around in, and the assets sold in the early LAND auctions were bought on the strength of a plan.

The Decentraland Foundation was established in the same year the world opened, and the governance structure around the project has been rearranged several times since.

Who actually controls Decentraland?

There is no single company that owns Decentraland. There are three separate bodies, and the distinction between them is worth understanding before you form a view on the token.

The Decentraland DAO. The DAO owns the contracts that matter: LAND, Estates, points of interest, Names, the decentralized content servers that host the world, the wearable collections and the marketplace contracts that handle sales, bids and fees. Voting power is derived from the MANA, LAND and Names associated with a wallet, and it can be delegated to someone else. The DAO was granted a ten year vesting contract of 222 million MANA to fund the ecosystem.

The Decentraland Foundation. A Panama private interest foundation, established in 2020. It holds the intellectual property, including the Decentraland trademark, the code repositories, the website and the reference client. Decentraland's terms of use state plainly that the Foundation does not own or control the platform. It is an operational body rather than a governing one.

DCL Regenesis Labs. A Cayman Islands foundation, announced in October 2025, set up as the execution arm of the DAO. It can hire people, sign contracts and manage projects in the real world, which a DAO cannot do on its own. It works to a budget approved by the DAO Council, does not hold the treasury, and has no authority over the MANA contract.

Governance has been rebuilt around those bodies. The DAO's grants program was its main spending mechanism, and it was frozen in 2024 for everything other than platform and core unit funding. A vote to unfreeze it was rejected by a wide margin, and a further proposal moved to deprecate the grants program and the bidding and tendering process altogether, citing vote influencing, misallocated funding and projects that underdelivered. In 2025 the DAO Committee was retired and its execution duties handed to a small multisig, with an elected DAO Council providing oversight.

Read that for what it is. A project of this kind concluding that its original governance model was not working, and replacing it with something more centralized and more accountable, is a substantial change. Whether it is an improvement is a judgment call. It is not a small detail.

What is MANA, technically?

It is an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. MANA transfers are Ethereum transactions, confirmed by Ethereum validators, with network fees paid in ether rather than in MANA. There is also a Polygon representation. MANA can be moved to Polygon, where it is used for most wearable and emote activity because the transaction costs are far lower. It is the same asset economically, but it is not the same token at the address level. It is not hard capped. The original 2017 terms described a continuous token model with ongoing issuance. In practice supply has fallen rather than risen, because MANA has been burned in primary market sales, but there is no protocol rule that caps it and issuance sits with governance. It carries no revenue rights. Holding MANA does not entitle you to dividends, a share of marketplace fees, a claim on the DAO treasury or any interest in the Foundation. It carries voting power. MANA counts towards voting power in the DAO alongside LAND and Names, so the token is a governance instrument as well as a currency.

What are LAND, Estates, Names and wearables?

Genesis City, Decentraland's main landmass, was designed around 90,601 LAND parcels, each sixteen meters square. Roughly half are private parcels, with the rest set aside as roads, plazas and district land. The map is fixed, which is the source of the scarcity argument that has always been made for Decentraland land.

LAND is an ERC-721 token, one per parcel. Estates group adjacent parcels into a single token so they can be developed and traded as one holding. Names are unique, transferable ERC-721 tokens used for avatar and world identity. Wearables and emotes are NFT collections, using ERC-721 or ERC-1155 depending on the contract, and most trading happens on Polygon. Rentals. LAND and Estate owners can list parcels for rent through the marketplace rather than selling them.

None of this comes with MANA. Buying the token does not give you land, a name or a wardrobe. Those are separate assets bought separately.

Do MANA burns reduce the supply?

Burning means sending tokens to an address nobody can spend from. Historically, MANA spent on primary market items was burned, and more than 600 million MANA was permanently removed during the original LAND auctions.

Two things qualify that. The first is that burn rules are governance decisions rather than fixed features of the protocol. In late 2022 the DAO voted to stop burning MANA when a Name is minted and to send the fee to the treasury instead, and the same could be decided for other categories.

The second is scale. Burning is driven by primary market activity, and primary market activity in Decentraland is modest. A burn mechanism that depends on people buying newly minted items removes very little when few newly minted items are being bought. No burn mechanism sets or guarantees a price, and nothing in the design commits to removing any particular amount.

Where does the software actually stand?

Decentraland 2.0, a rebuilt desktop client made in the Godot engine, launched in beta in October 2024 and is now the reference way to enter the world. A separate mobile client is in active development, with an Android build available on Google Play and an iOS build that was not officially supported at the time of writing. Decentraland was also listed on the Epic Games Store in March 2026, which is a meaningful distribution step for a project of this kind.

The honest read is that the software is real, is shipping and is getting easier to reach. It is also a project that has spent the years since the market's peak interest rebuilding its client and its governance at the same time, which tells you something about the state both were in.

What are the risks of holding MANA?

Usage risk. The central question about Decentraland has always been how many people are actually in it. Reported activity figures have been contested for years, with the project disputing third party measurements, and it is not a busy virtual world by the standards of mainstream games. If usage does not grow, the case for the token is difficult. No underlying business. MANA produces no revenue and holds no assets. There is no earnings figure, balance sheet or cash flow to value it against, so there is no floor set by fundamentals. Narrative dependence. MANA trades as a metaverse asset, and that narrative has been out of favor since 2022. It tends to move with sentiment about the category rather than with activity in Decentraland. Governance change and concentration. Voting power is proportional to holdings, so large holders carry disproportionate weight. The governance model has also been rewritten recently, with the grants program deprecated, a committee retired and execution moved to a small multisig and a Cayman Islands entity. Reduced ecosystem funding. The mechanism that funded most third party building in Decentraland was frozen and then deprecated. Less funded building means less to do in the world, which feeds back into the usage question. Competition. Decentraland competes with The Sandbox and other blockchain worlds, and far more seriously with Roblox, Fortnite and other conventional platforms that already have the audience and are not on a blockchain at all. Regulatory characterization. MANA was named as an alleged unregistered security in the United States Securities and Exchange Commission's June 2023 complaint against Binance. That case was dismissed in May 2025 without any ruling on the merits, so the underlying question was never decided by a court. Technical risk. In March 2022 a researcher reported a vulnerability that would have allowed LAND to be transferred without the owner's permission. It was fixed within hours and the eleven parcels involved were returned, but smart contracts, bridges and Polygon representations of a token can all fail or be exploited. Volatility. MANA is not a stablecoin. It has fallen very sharply from previous highs and long periods of decline are a normal feature of an asset like this. No consumer protection. Crypto assets are not covered by FDIC or SIPC insurance, and there is no government compensation scheme that will make you whole if the value of MANA falls or a platform fails. You should be prepared to lose all the money you put in.

Buying MANA with US dollars on CoinJar

CoinJar has operated since 2013 and lists MANA against US dollars, so you can buy, sell and hold it without converting through another cryptocurrency first. Current charges are on our fees page, and live US dollar rates are on our cryptocurrency prices page.

CoinJar, Inc. is registered with FinCEN as a money services business, NMLS ID 2492913, and holds money transmitter licenses in a growing number of states. You can check whether CoinJar operates in your state before signing up. Registration and licensing cover how CoinJar operates as a business. They are not an endorsement of MANA or of any cryptocurrency listed on the platform.

How is MANA taxed in the US?

The IRS treats digital assets such as MANA as property. A taxable event can occur when you sell it for US dollars, exchange it for another cryptocurrency, spend it or receive it as income.

The IRS sets out its approach on its digital assets page. Our guide to downloading a transaction history report explains how to pull the records you need. This is general information, not tax advice. Consider speaking to a qualified tax professional about your circumstances.