KuCoin AMA With The Sandbox — Enter a Virtual World Where You Can Build, Own and Monetize Games
Dear KuCoin Users,
Time: April 22, 2021, 10:00-11:18 (UTC)
KuCoin hosted an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything) session with The Sandbox COO and Co-Founder Sébastien Borget in the KuCoin Exchange Group.
Project Introduction
The Sandbox is a virtual world where players can build, own, and monetize their gaming experiences in the Ethereum blockchain using NFTs and SAND, the platform’s utility token.
Official Website: https://www.sandbox.game
White Paper:http://www.sandbox.game/The_Sandbox_Whitepaper_2020.pdf
Follow The Sandbox on Twitter and Telegram.
Guest:
Sébastien Borget — COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox
Q&A from KuCoin
Sébastien: Hello, my name is Sébastien Borget, I am the COO and co-founder of The Sandbox. I am also the president of the Blockchain Game Alliance, a non-profit organization with 200+ members from the blockchain and gaming industry. I am an advocate for NFTs and blockchain in games. Nice to meet you all!
Q: The Sandbox first announced the introduction of the blockchain ecosystem in 2018, while it became famous in two popular works "The Sandbox" and "The Sandbox Evolution". Could you please introduce your project, The Sandbox, for us?
Sébastien: The Sandbox is a virtual world where players can build, own, and monetize their gaming experiences in the Ethereum blockchain using NFTs and $SAND, the platform’s utility token.
$SAND serves as the basis of transactions and interactions, enabling players to play, own, govern, trade, and earn.
In The Sandbox, players create digital assets in the form of NFTs, upload them to the marketplace, and integrate them into games with the #nocode Game Maker.
The Sandbox metaverse is made up of 166,464 unique LAND NFTs – digital pieces of real estate – that players can own to publish their creations, monetize their games, or rent to other creators.
The Sandbox has released its main creation tools: VoxEdit – a 3D voxel editor "NFT Maker", the Marketplace and the Game Maker in Beta, that allows to create games without any programming knowledge and gives life to the NFTs, with behaviors, interactivity and logic.
The Sandbox was featured in the media earlier this week CNBC International and Reuters. Full CNBC video interview: https://youtu.be/CpNMcBEj05M
On April 14, The Sandbox was sold for 8.9M SAND (~$5.9M usd) worth of virtual LANDS during its latest LAND sale.
The Metaverse is a digital parallel universe that offers a set of unique experiences to users, where they can come, play, interact, socialize through their avatars.
We offer users to enter a virtual world where you can build, own and monetize games, next to gaming giants Atari, Square Enix and more!
The Sandbox metaverse invites players and creators to
- Make NFTs with VoxEdit #Voxels
- Sell and Trade them on our #Marketplace
- Create fun games with our #GameMaker
- Play, Stake and Earn $SAND #Crypto
- Play and Create with huge IPs and Brands
You can read more about us in our
Whitepaper: http://www.sandbox.game/The_Sandbox_Whitepaper_2020.pdf
Litepaper/One Pager: http://www.sandbox.game/The_Sandbox_One_Pager_2020.pdf
Q: The user ecological economy of The Sandbox is mainly composed of three different types of tokens: "SAND", "LAND" and "ASSET". Could you please introduce the application scenarios and usage methods of these three tokens?
Sébastien: $SAND will enable players to create, play, own, govern, trade and earn within The Sandbox virtual world gaming platform. It is the ERC-20 token that will be used all across The Sandbox metaverse.
$SAND tokens have the following utility on The Sandbox platform:
1. Medium of exchange: Players can potentially collect SAND through gameplay, and subsequently spend $SAND to play games, purchase equipment, or customize Avatar characters. Creators can spend SAND to acquire ASSETS and LAND. Artists can spend SAND to upload ASSETS to the Marketplace and buy GEMs for defining item rarity.
2. Governance: $SAND allows holders to participate in governance decisions. SAND owners can vote themselves or delegate voting rights to other players of their choice.
3. Staking: Users can stake $SAND tokens to earn rewards, as well as GEMs and CATALYSTs for ASSETS creation.
Our LAND token is a piece of digital real estate within The Sandbox metaverse. There is a limited number of LANDS, 166,464 in total, each with a unique location. Players can own, create and publish game experiences on their LAND. The game can be accessed through a virtual map where the locations of LANDs and proximity to larger Estates and key positions will play a role in the gameplay, economy and visibility of games. LAND is a primary way to access monetization on the platform. The Sandbox endeavors to build an ecosystem where interests are aligned between all the users—players, creators, land owners, curators, $SAND investors, etc.—who contribute to it. You can read more about our LAND token via this article: https://bit.ly/3jheRmg
Q: The concept of NFT has been very popular during recent months. What development do you think the NFT ecosystem will have in the future? Do you think that the NFT+DeFi type represented by DEGO. Finance will be the main development direction of NFT in the future?
Sébastien: There are several aspects of DeFi in The Sandbox.
The tokens collected by the players are ERC-20 and can be exchanged as valuable resources between the different types of users (hence a circular economy).
This is part of Play-2-Earn loop.
There are many ways in which users can monetize their time on the platform:
- Selling ASSETS: Users can create and sell ASSETS as NFTs on the marketplace
- Owning a LAND: Buy a LAND in one of the LAND sales. Players can then either rent them or populate them with content to increase the LAND's value.
- Building Games on the Game Maker: Creators can build and monetize games using the Game Maker on the LANDs that are owned by players.
- Playing and participating in the game: In the Game, not only can creators profit from their creations, players can play-to-earn by collecting resources, rewards, and tokens.
We launched the SAND LIquidity Mining Rewards program and are giving 1,500,000 SAND per month distributed as Yield Rewards to the users providing liquidity to the pool
https://uniswap.info/pair/0x3dd49f67E9d5Bc4C5E6634b3F70BfD9dc1b6BD74
Currently we have over $17M SAND/ETH in the pool, multiplied x10 from 1 month ago
Our community has been amazing and we are grateful and want to reward them for their contribution to the growth and success of the sandbox, through their contribution.
You can learn more about our SAND/ETH liquidity mining pool here:
https://medium.com/sandbox-game/introducing-sand-liquidity-mining-b56e99fe2261
In Phase 1, we are launching our SAND Liquidity Mining program with 1,500,000 SAND fixed amount per month distributed in Rewards.
In next Phases, we have introduced Yield multipliers based on LAND NFTs ownership.
Q: What do you think of other projects with NFT concepts, such as Enjin, Decentraland, and Cocos? Does The Sandbox currently have plans to cooperate with other NFT projects?
Sébastien: We think it is great to have many decentralized virtual worlds and even if we share similarities, each one has its own specificities. The Sandbox is more focused on building a gaming virtual world, where players can socialize in lobbies or play adventure/MMORPG-like type of games, with quests, fights, killing enemies, collecting items and rewards etc.
We have been in the video game industry for 10 years already! The Sandbox project has been around since 2012 on mobile platforms and has gathered more than 40 million global installs on mobile.
Also, NFTs allow interoperability and users have the ability to use their NFTs across these multiple platforms. This is the beauty of the metaverse.
If I may summarize The Sandbox, it would be:
- Make NFTs with VoxEdit #Voxels
- Sell and Trade them on our #Marketplace
- Create fun games with our #GameMaker
- Play, Stake and Earn $SAND #Crypto
We think the the future for UGC games is 100% owned by players #NFTs.
The community of players, creators, artists, land owners, $SAND holders are all stakeholders and they are directly being rewarded for their contribution to the growth of The Sandbox ecosystem. Their interests and our interests are aligned, and we are always thinking users-first. This is a very community-driven approach.
To date, The Sandbox team has secured over 60 partnerships from major brands such as Atari, Care Bears and Shaun the Sheep and award-winning mobile game studios. Partnerships include top decentralized games such as MyCryptoHeroes, Axie Infinity, and industry partners such as Matic, MakerDao, Klaytn, OpenSea, Bitski, Dapp.com, and DappRadar.
Some of these partners will recreate games from their renowned IPs such as ATARI with their games Roller Coaster Tycoon, Asteroids and Pong that will populate several ESTATEs across the metaverse they will also create a theme-park like universe based on a variety of their game titles.
Shaun the Sheep will build a new version of their Mossy Bottom Farm as well faithful renditions of the CryptoKitties identity.
Others will create unique ecosystem that our communities could bond over like Sandbox Networks the second largest MCN company in Korea, racing games (Battle Racers, Axie Infinity), or simply work towards improving decentralized exchanges together (MakerDAO, Metamask, Matic, OpenSea, DMarket, Opera, Gitcoin or Status.)
And last but not least we can also count on partners like Square Enix (with their valuable portfolio of IP, including: FINAL FANTASY, DRAGON QUEST, TOMB RAIDER and many others) that participated in an investment round into The Sandbox last year.
We've also new major partnerships ongoing, yet to be announced. These will be Entertainment Brands (think Hollywood Movies) and big Gaming studios.
Q: The Sandbox project token SAND is available in the KuCoin Spot Market. What are the future cooperation plans with KuCoin?
Sébastien: NFTs of course.
We are looking at ways to enable KuCoin users to experiment for the first time with NFTs, own them, collect them, and play with them.
Our community of artists has created many NFTs for our partners like CoinMarketCap, Atari, Care Bears, The Smurfs, etc. so we hope to find a way to have KuCoin NFts that you would use to create your own stories, adventures, games or experiences in the metaverse.
Here's an example with CoinMarketCap:
Q: Could you please introduce the future plan of the project to the KuCoin community users/SAND token holders/potential users of The Sandbox?
Sébastien: Over the next few months, we are planning to open our Metaverse by launching the first public Alpha of the Game Client where users will be able to join and socialize in our main hub or participate in the first play to earn season.
They will experience 40 levels over a 15-day period of time and depending on their completion, they can claim tokens and NFTs.
Also, we will continue to release major updates of our Game Maker Beta, VoxEdit Beta and Marketplace Beta with implementation of layer 2 as well to facilitate transactions.
We are going to continue also progressively selling our LANDS until the end of 2022 where 100% of it will be sold and introduce the DAO for governance.
In the next 3-5 years we expect The Sandbox to be fully decentralized, run by the community itself.
Our goal is to create the success stories from creators we've empowering and we hope to see you become a part of our community soon.
👉 LINKS 👈
🔹 Register for The Sandbox (https://bit.ly/3j1mOMA)
🔹 Read about The Sandbox (https://medium.com/sandbox-game/what-is-the-sandbox-850de68d893e)
🔹 Knowledge Base & FAQ (http://bit.ly/386qf0R)
🔹 News & announcements channel (https://t.me/sandboxnews)
🔹 Trade & price talks channel (https://t.me/sandboxgametrading)
🔹 Official Discord Community (https://discord.gg/cgCFFjj)
🔹 Official social networks and blogs (https://linktr.ee/sandbox)
🔹 2021 Teaser (https://youtu.be/0Jquhzr4d4k)
Free-Ask from KuCoin Community
Q: Why choose the project name as The Sandbox? Is there any reason behind that?
Sébastien: Yes. Sandbox games is a category of games where creators can make their own worlds so we called ourselves The Sandbox as we always aimed to turn players into makers and be one of the most intuitive tools for it.
Q: With NFTs and LAND, does it allow use for exhibition or as a gallery?
Sébastien: Yes it does, we have recently enabled the possibility to display and showcase external NFTs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bglDDuVV6w
Q: Now, the token launch process is easy, but to develop the ecosystem, stabilize prices, expand the market is a challenge in every project. So what are your team's first steps towards solving this problem? What is your plan to maintain token price and supply in the market?
Sébastien: Yes, we have been building The Sandbox for over 3 years now and overall the franchise is 10 years old.
The Sandbox team is now 100 people working on the different products of our platform: Marketplace, Game Maker, Game Client, Multiplayer, Blockchain, VoxEdit, Avatar, etc.
Q: How does The Sandbox rate the importance of the user community? What was The Sandbox's plan to build the user community?
Sébastien: We are 100% about Community and Community is 100% about The Sandbox. We will be fully decentralized in 3 to 5 years, users will own all LANDs, all SAND tokens, all NFTs and govern this virtual world.
Q: Does SAND have any special plan for the Southeast Asian market?
Sébastien: Yes, we are listed in Indonesia and we are running activities in the Philippines, also looking to expand in Malaysia.
Q: Most investors just focus on the price of a token in the short term instead of the real value of the project. Can you tell us the motivation and benefits for investors to the SAND token long term?
Sébastien: We are focusing on #buidling.
You can see all the content we have created and also the user-created content from our community on our Twitter, Discord, and other social channels.
Q: Can you please explain how to collect SAND through the gameplay?
Sébastien: Yes! Once we launch the public alpha, you will be able to enter the first Season called Explorers: https://medium.com/sandbox-game/the-sandbox-introducing-pre-season-0-b147aa8595e
Q: Is there anything else you would like to share or you want us to know?
Sébastien: The Sandbox is more focused on gaming primarily, offering gameplay mechanics inspired by MMORPG games, that are not found in others which are more social or VR oriented.
We are building a gaming virtual world, where players can socialize in lobbies or play games, live all sorts of other experiences, visit art galleries, museums or attend virtual shows or concerts.
One of the main successes of The Sandbox is that its map has not yet been entirely sold, but only 45%. And it has no single center of interest or origin, but it has a multiplicity of interesting locations that combine brands, IPs, games, artists, social lounges and more; so that players and creators will be seeing a lot of variety once they will create or play there.
We have been in the video game industry for 10 years already, as The Sandbox franchise started as a mobile game in 2012 on mobile platforms; and has gathered more than 40 million global installs on mobile.
We are also working with big IPs, big brands. We are using selling their NFTs on our Marketplace, but there are much more than just digital collectibles; any user can get them to do his own games, stories, adventures or experiences using his favorite characters and content from this IP.
Giveaway Section
KuCoin and The Sandbox have prepared a total of 3,000 SAND to give away to AMA participants.
1. Red envelope giveaways: 960 SAND
2. Free-ask section: 90 SAND
3. Post-AMA activity: 1,950 SAND
Activity 1 — Quiz: 1,500 SAND
Activity 2 — Price Guess: 450 SAND
. . .
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