The Sandbox (SAND) metaverse

What is The Sandbox?

The Sandbox is a virtual world (metaverse) that allows players to create, store and exchange digital assets in NFT. The game belongs to the Play-to-Earn (P2E, "play to earn") genre, which became especially popular in 2021 at the peak of the hype around the crypto industry.

The story of The Sandbox began in 2012 when developers at Pixpowl Studios first released a mobile version of the game on iOS. By 2021, the number of downloads of the mobile game exceeded 40 million. In its mechanics, The Sandbox resembles the popular games Minecraft and Roblox.

One of the game's main elements is virtual plots of land (LANDS), which the user can purchase on a marketplace, including third-party ones like OpenSea, or win in a raffle. With multiple plots, players can combine them into Estates, making them rarer and, as a result, more valuable.

In 2018, developers ported the game The Sandbox to the Ethereum blockchain. This port empowered users and gave ownership of their game assets through blockchain and smart contract technologies. According to the team, The Sandbox's primary mission is to bring blockchain technology to mainstream gaming.

In November, the project raised $93 million from funds such as SoftBank Group, Liberty City Ventures, Galaxy, Samsung Next, Polygon Studios, Stakefish and others.

The Sandbox ecosystem

Pixpowl Studios has released three major products:

VoxEdit,
marketplace,
the Sandbox Game Maker.

The first product, VoxEdit or Voxel Editor, is an editor that allows players to create so-called "voxel 3D models" or, in other words, digital objects of The Sandbox game. Players can also customize the image of characters and even animate them. These objects can be anything from people, animals, objects and even tree leaves. Each item created in VoxEdit can then be brought into the game as an NFT.

The second product is a marketplace where users can post and sell 3D objects created in VoxEdit as NFTs or buy digital assets created by other players. When a user uploads their 3D model to the marketplace, it is recorded on the blockchain and automatically gives the author ownership rights.

Finally, the third product is The Sandbox Game Maker. Any developer or user can create their own game inside The Sandbox metaverse using the visual editor, even without programming skills.

SAND cryptocurrency

SAND is a native ERC-20 token of The Sandbox metaverse created on the Ethereum blockchain. SAND is a utility token, meaning it is used as a core asset within The Sandbox ecosystem. SAND tokens are used to trade NFTs on the project's marketplace. Users can also use SAND tokens to generate revenue from steaking on the platform and voting, thereby participating in project management.

The token was launched in August 2020. In the same month, The Sandbox held an IEO on the Binance trading platform: 360 million SAND tokens were distributed among users who contributed BNB cryptocurrency to a unique pool on the exchange.

In addition to the ERC-20 SAND tokens, the game itself still features two other asset types in the form of NFTs:

ASSETS — non-interchangeable tokens of the ERC-1155 standard, which are game items created by users in the VoxEdit editor;
LAND — virtual plots of land in ERC-721 format, each representing a unique object, in contrast to ERC-1125, where each digital object can have many copies.

Currently, 2.1 billion SAND is circulating on the market — about 70% of the maximum issue (3 billion). The token's capitalization is $824bn. The historical maximum price was recorded at $8.44, against which the price fell by 95.3% to $0.36 as of November 2023 amid a general decline in the crypto market. At the same time, the price has remained virtually unchanged since the beginning of the year despite the growth of most altcoins in 2023.

The Sandbox's outlook

In 2022, The Sandbox team had strategic partnerships with well-known French hardware wallet manufacturer Ledger, Skybound Entertainment studio, a multi-platform company and one of the gaming industry pioneers Atari, popular Delaware-based monitoring service CoinMarketCap, and others.

The Sandbox also has other equally well-known partners, including Opera, Flow, CryptoKitties, Maker, Hashed, and Klaytn, and in February 2023, it even announced cooperation with the authorities of Saudi Arabia. Celebrities such as Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton have partnered with the project, with even the British Museum planning to open a presence in The Sandbox meta-universe.