Esteban Ordano is a software engineer who co-founded Decentraland alongside Ari Meilich, who moved on to found Big Time Studios in April 2020. Ordano held the position as Decentraland’s chief technology officer, though he recently stepped back to a more advisory role after the platform became a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Meilich also holds an adviser position in the project despite his departure. Meilich and Ordano are Argentinian software developers with varying backgrounds in the crypto space.
Ordano went to school at the Instituto Tecnologico de Buenos Aires engineering school and worked as an engineering intern at Google for a brief period before starting at BitPay. Ordano also helped build a few Bitcoin-related products. Meilich studied neuroscience and economics at New York University and used Bitcoin to run his outsourcing business in college, which struggled due to the country’s strict laws. This usage exposed him to the ‘freedom’ offered by blockchain technology, which inspired him to join Voltaire, a ‘hacker house’ in Buenos Aires. Meilich and Ordano met at Voltaire before getting together to start Decentraland.
2021 was the year that Metaverse and NFTs went mainstream, and while many might attribute that exposure to Facebook’s ‘Meta’ rebranding, Decentraland served no small role in the mania. The project, which has been around since 2018, saw the value of its MANA token skyrocket from less than a dollar to a high of over $5 in October alongside the Meta reveal. In June, the project set a record for selling an NFT representing a plot of virtual land for just under $1 million. Republic Realm, a digital real estate investment firm, aims to build a virtual shopping district within Decentraland.
Decentraland’s MANA token was also one of the lucky projects to earn a spot in Grayscale’s crypto Trust initiative. Grayscale launched the MANA trust in March, alongside ones for Basic Attention Token, Chainlink, Filecoin, and Livepeer. The project broke its own record in November when a subsidiary of Tokens.com, the Metaverse Group, bought a virtual plot for $2.43 million. The Metaverse Group plans to host digital fashion events on its plot.
In late October, the project announced its ‘Metaverse Festival’ with headliners like Deadmau5, Flume, and Paris Hilton. It garnered 50,000 attendees and was successful enough that the project will hold another in 2022. In the midst of all of this, Meilich left his Decentraland position and announced Big Time Studios in May. Publications revealed that the studio raised $21 million, and Meilich hopes to build the first AAA video game powered entirely by NFTs.
Decentraland has already celebrated a few key moments in 2022. Most notably, in the first week of January, Samsung announced it would build a virtual replica of a physical shop in New York in Decentraland. The electronics company notes that this was one of the largest brand takeovers in Decentraland.
Decentraland also partnered with Tennis Australia to host a virtual Australian Open event. The initiative will include a virtual recreation of several Tennis-centric areas in Melbourne Park. An Australian Open spokesperson claims it will continue working with Decentraland in the future. It is expected that Ordano will continue to pursue big brand deals in 2022 and that Decentraland will see continued adoption with his active help.
Metaverse
