In Brief:
- Decentraland (official site) opened pre-registration for a building competition called the Friendzone buildathon, announced through its official X account.
- An Eventbrite listing carries the title “Decentraland Friendzone Mobile Buildathon,” tying the contest to the platform’s new phone client.
- Decentraland has not published dates, prize amounts, entry rules or judging criteria.
Decentraland opened pre-registration for the Friendzone buildathon, the team said in a post on X, without publishing dates, prize amounts or entry rules.
“Today’s a great day to start building in Decentraland,” the post said. “Pre-registration for the Friendzone buildathon is open!”
Today's a great day to start building in Decentraland.
Pre-registration for the Friendzone buildathon is open!@DecentralandView on X ↗
The announcement carries no terms. No prize pool, no submission window, no judging panel and no eligibility rules have been released, and nothing about the competition appears on Decentraland’s announcements blog.
What the listing says
One public detail points to the format. The event appears in Eventbrite’s online hackathon directory under the title “Decentraland Friendzone Mobile Buildathon,” which puts phones at the center of it.
That fits where the platform has spent 2026.
The mobile push
Decentraland launched on the Epic Games Store on March 31, with its Android app going live the same day and an iOS release flagged as coming soon. Anyone who downloaded the client through Epic got an Epic Arrival Shield wearable for a limited period.
DCL Regenesis Labs, the platform’s development team, had published a 2026 roadmap for a standalone iOS and Android client on Feb. 18. It set out two milestone releases across the first and second quarters, adding chat, friends, events and performance work.
The mobile build replaces keyboard and mouse with on-screen controls: a joystick, an interaction button, camera and chat, designed for touch and one-handed use. The world and the account stay the same.
But the content doesn’t always follow. Decentraland's own documentation says some scenes built for desktop aren’t yet optimized for phones, and that creators are updating them. The company has said the mobile experience is built for shorter, more frequent visits rather than long sessions.
Executive Director Yemel Jardi framed the Epic Games Store move as part of a strategy to “meet people where they already are,” with more storefronts planned. A launch party ran in-world on April 2 at 7 p.m. UTC with Dúo Dø and DirkNeuenfels, and streamed on Twitch.
A recurring format
Buildathons are old ground for Decentraland. At the Decentraland Summit, teams of four to six had three hours to build a 3×3 scene on the theme “Cultural Odyssey.” The Parcel Creatorverse Buildathon, presented by Pangea and sponsored by Decentraland and the Museum of Crypto Art, opened June 27 with $10,000 in prizes.
Scale has varied wildly. The 2019 Builder contest put 50 parcels of LAND and 900,000 MANA on the table, with 200,000 MANA for first place. A later SDK game jam ran a 2,500,000 MANA pool alongside 200 LAND.
Creator costs are moving in the other direction. A governance vote that closed July 28 raised the fee for submitting new wearables and emotes to $25 from $5, pitched as a way to lift submission quality by putting more money behind each entry.
The last time Decentraland backed a buildathon at the top end, in 2022, Metaverse Group ran it with GDA Capital, RENOVI and the Decentraland Foundation. Entries opened Jan. 30 and closed March 31, with a land parcel valued at $250,000 and $50,000 in RENOVI tokens as the headline prizes. Aftermath Islands added $10,000 in virtual land.
It drew 160 entries. Javier Zubia of MORFA architects won, taking a Decentraland parcel, 3,500 SAND, 2,000 RNVI tokens and a Threedium license, alongside 62 other winners.
