What happens when games and blockchains meet? Many experiments have been done over the years, but little has been said about it, and nothing has really reached the general public. This time the situation could change: with the NFT craze which has filled the pages of newspapers and blogs in the sector, a project (in development for more than 3 years) is about to reach everyone’s reach.
The Sandbox is a blockchain game. This is the simplest definition that can be given, but it is also the one that gives less justice to the complexity of the project. Just in the weeks that Roblox went public, The Sandbox has reached one of the peaks of maximum notoriety and success. The platform is a set of products and services for create, manage and play adventures and experiences using the blockchain as a permanent record to give value and uniqueness to the work of creation.
It’s hard to explain all what you can do about The Sandbox. After a development of about 3 years, a few months ago the platform offered its first product: a map, composed of 166.464 digital plots of land, which has been sold on multiple occasions. Today the map is complete at 45%, but already there are interesting economic dynamics that make one piece of land more important than another, and in general the value of all lots is increasing every day because the map has been fixed: when the lots to buy are finished, there is no can do is rent them or use them to play (but not only).
The lots were for sale directly on the site, or available for purchase through an auction system on Opensea, one of the most important NFT exchange platforms. Only in February, for example, were they sold over 2.8 million dollars in lots, and a single piece of land was auctioned for approx 300 thousand dollars. Those who buy at such high prices do so for a simple reason: some lots are important strategic in the map. Some of the most important buyers, in fact, are very important entities in the crypto world but also outside: for example, Atari (video game and console manufacturer) bought lots for well 2 million dollars, and also Coinmarketcap and Binance (the former an aggregator of data on all crypto, the latter the largest exchange market for crypto volumes in the world) have bought many lots, and this is evident: it is all written on the blockchain.
Photo: The Sandbox map (Giacomo Barbieri / La Stampa)
Having a lot close to an important brand means being able to offer that lot to third-party customers by telling about the proximity to products and services that everyone uses: exactly like when a real estate agent convinces a person to buy an apartment in the center of Rome rather than in the suburbs or in a village many kilometers away. In both cases, the proximity to services (be it physical or digital) makes a difference. This is because the lots are not simply pieces of land but, as in Monopoli (or in the real world) you can build above, and create a building with services and scenes that make them suitable for one experience rather than another. Atari could create a giant game, with all the lots it has bought, while an entrepreneur could build a conference room to rent to communities and companies that want to host events in distinctive settings.
On the one hand there are the users of the world, therefore, and on the other there are the creators: the latter, through a software package provided by The Sandbox, they can either create games (with the Game Maker), be create objects and characters (with VoxEdit), which they can then resell on the trading platform, active in beta from 30 March. Either way, the creators are in effect gods digital craftsmen, which provide the elements or experiences to make The Sandbox a full-fledged metaverse.
In this period of strong growth, the platform team has put together a series of initiatives aimed at funding the work of the creators, and at the launch of the beta platform 46 artists were announced who produced 112 creations that they can add to their lands. And everything that is created is not owned by The Sandbox, but it is attributed directly to the creator and written on the blockchain, thus maintaining the copyright.
The Sandbox is perhaps one of the examples of the complexity that a blockchain application can achieve, and of how decentralization can be leveraged to redistribute wealth. The application is accessible via the blockchain Ethereum, protagonist of a considerable increase in the volume of transactions in the last 6 months, which also led to an increase in commissions for each transaction.