In Brief:
- Decentraland (official site) has thrown open pre-registration for a building contest known as the Friendzone buildathon, with the news arriving via its official X account.
- The contest is listed on Eventbrite as “Decentraland Friendzone Mobile Buildathon,” a title that links it to the platform’s newly released phone client.
- Dates, prize amounts, entry rules and judging criteria have all gone unpublished by Decentraland.
Pre-registration for the Friendzone buildathon is now open, Decentraland said in an X post that left out dates, prize amounts and 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 ↗
Terms are entirely absent from the announcement. Nothing has been released on a prize pool, a submission window, a judging panel or eligibility, and the competition is nowhere to be found on Decentraland’s announcements blog.
What the listing says
A single public detail hints at the format. Eventbrite’s online hackathon directory carries the event as “Decentraland Friendzone Mobile Buildathon” — a name that places phones at the heart of the contest.
That squares with how the platform has spent 2026.
The mobile push
March 31 brought Decentraland to the Epic Games Store, with the Android app arriving that same day and an iOS version marked as coming soon. Users who grabbed the client via Epic received an Epic Arrival Shield wearable during a limited window.
A 2026 roadmap for a standalone iOS and Android client had already been published on Feb. 18 by DCL Regenesis Labs, the platform’s development team. It laid out two milestone releases spanning the first and second quarters, bringing chat, friends, events and performance improvements.
On mobile, keyboard and mouse give way to on-screen controls — a joystick, an interaction button, camera and chat — built around touch and one-handed play. The world itself and the account behind it remain unchanged.
The content, though, hasn’t entirely kept pace. Decentraland’s own documentation notes that certain scenes made for desktop have yet to be optimized for phones, with creators working through updates. According to the company, the mobile experience is designed around shorter, more frequent visits instead of extended sessions.
Yemel Jardi, the Executive Director, described the Epic Games Store launch as part of a plan to “meet people where they already are,” and said more storefronts are on the way. An in-world launch party took place April 2 at 7 p.m. UTC featuring Dúo Dø and DirkNeuenfels, with a Twitch stream alongside it.
A recurring format
None of this is new territory for Decentraland. Teams of four to six at the Decentraland Summit were given three hours to construct a 3×3 scene around the theme “Cultural Odyssey.” Presented by Pangea and sponsored by Decentraland and the Museum of Crypto Art, the Parcel Creatorverse Buildathon opened June 27 carrying $10,000 in prizes.
The scale of these events has swung dramatically. Back in 2019, the Builder contest offered 50 parcels of LAND and 900,000 MANA, with first place worth 200,000 MANA. A subsequent SDK game jam featured a 2,500,000 MANA pool along with 200 LAND.
For creators, costs are heading the opposite way. A governance vote concluded July 28 lifted the submission fee for new wearables and emotes from $5 to $25, framed as a means of improving submission quality by raising the stakes per entry.
Decentraland’s last big-money buildathon came in 2022, run by Metaverse Group together with GDA Capital, RENOVI and the Decentraland Foundation. The entry period opened Jan. 30 and closed March 31, headlined by a land parcel valued at $250,000 and $50,000 in RENOVI tokens. A further $10,000 in virtual land came from Aftermath Islands.
A total of 160 entries came in. The winner was Javier Zubia of MORFA architects, who collected a Decentraland parcel, 3,500 SAND, 2,000 RNVI tokens and a Threedium license — one of 63 winners in all.