The Sandbox – SAND is a blockchain metaverse video game, often compared to Minecraft and Roblox where players can play and build their own virtual environment, block by block. What sets The Sandbox apart from traditional video games, is that it’s free to play – F2P and players can earn an additional income through rewards.
The Sandbox – SAND is a virtual 3D metaverse, built on the blockchain where players can play, gather, and build selfmade creations (e.g. landscape, houses, interior,…) and implement these into their virtual environment. Doing so, players can monetize their gaming experience by selling virtual land or selfmade objects as NFTs, where they retain full ownership over. Players can also earn rewards by participating in The Sandbox ecosystem.
This review of The SandBox (SAND) was created for informational purposes. This article is not intended for promotion.
Due to the huge success of the well known Minecraft video game, Pixowl Game Studio created The Sandbox – SAND as a competitor. It launched its first and 2D version of The Sandbox in 2011 as a mobile videogame, resulting in more than 40 Million downloads. In 2016 it launched its sequel 2D video game, named The Sandbox Evolution.
In 2018 co-founders Arthur Madrid and Sebastien Borget were looking to transform the mobile version into a 3D blockchain PC video game. This version was released in 2020 and became one of the fastest-growing games in the Play to Earn – P2E industry, next to two other main blockchain games Axie Infinity and Decentraland.
The Sandbox team counts 42 members, located in 3 offices with 28 full time employees. The core team consists of the following:
Arthur Madrid – Chief Executive Officer and Director
Arthur Madrid is Co-founder and CEO of Pixowl as well as The Sandbox. Board Member of Animoca Brands and a longtime social-gaming entrepreneur. Arthur began his career building a Pay to Play (P2P) delivery platform for Media companies, one of the first Distributed Computing Software – DCIA platforms. Now, he is focusing on Blockchain Gaming.
Sebastien Borget – Chief Operating Officer and Director
Sébastien Borget is the Co-founder and COO of Pixowl as well as The Sandbox. Passionate for blockchain technology, gaming and education, active speaker and evangelist on the opportunity Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). He is building the metaverse with The Sandbox that is empowering players through NFTs, enabling them to own, buy, sell and trade their 3D creations on their Marketplace and use them in their Game Maker.
Marcelo Santurio – Chief Financial Officer
Marcelo Santurio is the Co-founder of the first online payment company in Latam and has +20 years experience in Finance, Tech, and Gaming. He has an MBA from the London Business School with specialization on Finance and Execute Program at MIT in Entrepreneurship.
Pablo Iglesias – Inventor of The Sandbox Game
Pablo Iglesias has over ten years of experience in researching and developing emergent procedural systems while leading teams of professionals through several successful games.
Lucas Shrewsbury – Chief Technology Officer
Lucas Shrewbury has spent more than a decade leading mobile gaming studios. While at Gameloft Argentina, he managed the studio and a team of 200 people.
View the summary of the Sandbox roadmap.
With a few milestones met, Sandbox launched its official product and started it their Alpha season in 2021. Also staking mechanisms have kicked off. In 2022 some major partnerships are waiting to be announced, new games will be available and additional seasons will be added where players can play to earn. 2023 will be the year where Sandbox will expand to over 5,000 different games and launch their DAO, where token holders can participate in major decisions on the Game Platform.
Read the official Sandbox whitepaper here. Also note that all smart contracts are made publicly available on Github and were audited by Certik
A few historical achievements are listed below;
Currently The Sandbox already partnered with major brands, such as:
– Deadmau5 music producer
– Adidas shoes, sportswear manufacturer
– ATARI video game console’s (‘70s to the mid-’80)
– Snoop Dogg hip-hop star
– Rollercoaster Tycoon PC videogame
– Care Bears animated television series (1983 – 1988)
– The Smurfs Belgian comic franchise (1977 – 2013)
– CryptoKitties blockchain NFT videogame on Ethereum
– The Walking Dead television series, telltalevideogames
The Sandbox’s token SAND is an ERC-20 utility token built on the Ethereum blockchain that allows you to buy/sell land and assets in The Sandbox metaverse. You can do this at it’s own dedicated NFT marketplace.
LANDS are ERC-721 non-fungible tokens – NFTs representing virtual locations in The Sandbox metaverse by which creators can monetize their creations. There will only be 166,464 LANDS available, which can be used to host games, build multiplayer experiences, build houses, or offer social experiences to the community.
The Sandbox will also offer incentives that combine NFTs and SAND tokens in a second phase of liquidity mining to apply a yield multiplier based on the number of LANDS owned.
You can stake your SAND/ETH tokens on UniSwap to be eligible to a monthly allocation of SAND tokens. You can also earn NFTs for each month that you remain in the staking program.
For a full instructions manual on how to stake SAND tokens click here.
Anyone can build 3D games for free by downloading The Sandbox Game Maker. Check out the minimum System requirements and download the Game Maker here.
The first season started on the 29th of november 2021 and ended on the 20th of november 2021. Level 1,‘The NFT Institute’ was free to play for everyone. Where you can perform small quests when you visit the NFT museum. If you do, don’t forget to check out the basement.
You’ll need an Alpha Pass NFT ticket to explore all 18 experiences of the Alpha Season -and to be eligible to earn a selection of 1,000 SAND tokens and 3 exclusive NFT rewards. Players without an Alpha Pass will not be able to earn Play-to-Earn rewards. They still can partake in 3 full experiences from the Alpha Hub. This hub represents a central point from which you can travel to different locations through portals.
Stay tuned because Alpha Season 2 is coming soon! The release date has not yet been communicated.
During the period May 2019 to November 2019, the Company completed a private sale for an amount of 3,410,000 USD. The private placement round was done through equity and token sale agreements:
SAND tokens allocated to investors through the Private Sale, Founders, Team and Advisors are 100% locked with a 5 years vesting period and a 12-month cliff, meaning devs must work for a minimum of one year for the Sandbox project.
In the future, SAND will also serve as a governance token, allowing its holders to have input on changes to the ecosystem when the Sandbox decentralized autonomous organization – DAO is established. In addition to being acquired through staking SAND, GEMs can be purchased from other players.
GEMs are an ERC-20 utility tokens, which are burnt on usage, and define your ASSET’s attributes. These attributes define your ASSET’s stats and will be displayed in the Sandbox video game throughout the metaverse.
The more attributes your ASSETs have, the more useful you’ll find them within the Sandbox metaverse, and hereby raising their value. One GEM will be able to provide 25 attribute points to an ASSET and with the help of CATALYSTs you will be able to socket up to 4 GEMs, meaning up to 100 attribute points.
It will be possible to obtain CATALYSTs through several methods in the metaverse. More information on these methods will be released in the future.
There are four different tiers, which define both the number of sockets that your ASSETs have and their scarcity. The higher the tier of the CATALYST is, the more scarce and powerful the ASSET will be.
The Sandbox – SAND has risen sharply in price ever since Facebook announced it would change it’s brand name to META (referring to Metaverse) on 28 October 2021. It’s value rose from below $1 to $3.15 and later on to a soaring peak of $8.40 on 25 November 2021.
We think SAND is one of the better picks when it comes to metaverse tokens, since it has already proven it’s usage and adoption, next to Axie Infinity and Decentraland. Time will tell if The Sandbox can follow in the footsteps of the well-known Minecraft video game which was fully released on 18 November 2011 with 130M to 175M monthly active players throughout 2021.
Obviously there is still a lot of ground to cover before this would ever happen, but we see a lot of potential if they succeed in bringing The Sandbox’s latest version to tablets and smartphones. Combining this with a mainstream adoption of Play-2-Earn games the future of Sandbox might be bright. But for Sandbox’s sake, let’s hope Minecraft will not integrate a Play-2-Earn rewarding system potentially making Sandbox obsolete.
With partnerships such as The Walking Dead, Adidas, Snoop Dogg and many more, there might be a lot more engagement coming to The Sandbox Metaverse. At the looks of it, The Sandbox Metaverse might speak to mainstream gamers. Keep in mind that blockchain gaming, metaverse and Play to Earn – P2E are still in its infancy phase and that it is more risky to place your bets on one single video game, rather than to invest in blockchain gaming software like Enjin – ENJ for example.
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