Decentraland announced that owners of virtual properties in their metaverse can now lend their properties to other people. Decentraland is a metaverse platform that offers virtual land and properties. With this announcement, the company declared that LAND owners could use this new platform feature to become landlords and allow other people who want to use the virtual property for their usage and are willing to pay rent for it. The data will be maintained on a server that is managed by the Decentraland Foundation in an off-chain manner, whereas the transactions that are conducted using Ethereum will be recorded on-chain.

Apart from purchasing virtual properties, the announcement also represents an opportunity for engagement between different parties, that can be utilized to play games using interactive decentralized applications. The rental facility can become a passive income for owners of virtual assets in Decentraland. Esteban Ordano and Ari Meilich are the professional Blockchain developers who designed the smart contracts for Decentraland. With this rental support, metaverse real estate is on the brink of becoming a full-fledged investment alternative for real-world real estate developers.

Decentraland was launched in 2020, and in the beginning, the company offered users to buy virtual plots of land using the native tokens on the Ethereum Blockchain, MANA. Apart from the ERC-20 token, the MANA, Decentraland, has an ERC-21 token, ESTATE, representing virtual land as a non-fungible tokenized asset. Decentraland announced that the land owners must allow the Rent Smart Contract as a requirement to control their LAND on-chain before they are listed on the Decentraland marketplace. LAND owners can set the price during the listing and control the number of days they want to list their LAND for rental services. Post the number of days the owner has listed; the LAND will be automatically removed from the list if it is not rented.

Apart from that, LAND owners can edit the rental details for their virtual property with transaction implications. They can also claim their LANDs back from the tenants by seeking the Operator’s permission. There is no transaction fee for listing your LAND for rental. In the notification by Decentraland, the company said that tenants could access all the available virtual properties for sale or rent in the marketplace under the LAND section. To rent virtual land, a tenant must allow the Renting Smart Contract to manage their MANA before finalizing the duration and paying for the rental. Post the payment, and the platform automatically releases an Operator Permission which the owner post-expiry of the contract can reclaim.

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