Welcome to Part 3 of our in-depth research into the metaverse!

This report series aims to delve into the metaverse through describing its capabilities, applications, and developments; explaining different, prominent implementations of the metaverse in the context of Decentraland, Somnium, The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels, and Upland; offering explanations for different virtual real-estate offerings in each of these metaverses and the process of buying/renting land in each; as well as an offering a description of companies that facilitate virtual real-estate offerings within the metaverse.

As you know, the metaverse refers to a collectively shared virtual space that arises through the convergence of virtual and augmented reality, as well as the internet. It’s often heralded as a burgeoning, next-generation iteration of the internet, consisting of universally existent/accessible, three-dimensional, shared virtual spaces residing within a larger virtual universe.

This report installation of the series will focus specifically on the metaverse implementation known as The Sandbox: a community-driven platform where creators are enabled to monetize digital assets and gaming experiences in a decentralized, blockchain-based environment.

What is The Sandbox Real Estate?

The Sandbox is a community, user-generated content (UGC) driven platform where creators are enabled to monetize digital assets and gaming experiences in a decentralized, blockchain-based environment. The platform offers a wide variety of gaming experiences (e.g., Viking Fjord, Mushroom Mania, Sweet Village, etc.) with a very similar style and format to the popular video game, Minecraft, developed by Mojang Studios. 

To facilitate ownership of digital items and transactions within each of these games, NFTs are minted on the blockchain on the basis of digital scarcity, security, and authenticity.

One of the primary in-game assets represented in the form of NFTs is LAND: a component of the Sandbox metaverse which is based on the ERC-721 smart contract which one can buy and use to develop game experiences via Sandbox’s base of digital assets (i.e., ERC-1155 items referred to as ASSETS). Aside from NFTs, Sandbox’s main utility token that enables users to buy and sell LAND and ASSETS is called $SAND, which is available via Binance, Uniswap, Simplex, Gemini, Kucoin, and many other exchanges.

Like other metaverse implementations, community is at the forefront of Sandbox’s user experience. To this end, Sandbox maintains a very active user Discord and broader social media channels (e.g., Twitter, Medium, Telegram, Twitch, YouTube, etc.)  to engage and communicate with users as well as facilitate strong, continuous engagement and interaction.

The Sandbox game engine is built atop Unity and optimized for desktop setups. Via Unity’s Universal Render Pipeline (URP), Sandbox will ultimately have the capacity to support mobile platforms/development in the future without the need to sacrifice game quality. The Unity game engine also provides support for customized, Voxel-based models, rigging, and a variety of animation formats derived from VoxEdit.

What Makes the Sandbox Tick?

LAND is an ERC-721 token within the Sandbox metaverse representing a digital piece of real estate on the Sandbox map. Players can buy LAND to build various experiences on top of it; once a player owns it, they’ll be able to populate it with games and ASSETs of various kinds. Similar to other metaverse implementations, LAND is capable of being combined to form an ESTATE, where creators teams are empowered to produce larger and more immersive online experiences. Sandbox’s LAND is scarce, with a supply of only 166,464 parcels being available within the Sandbox metaverse. Each basic unit of LAND on the Sandbox map comprises 96×96 meters within the Sandbox world, which accommodates the whole variety of in-game blockchain experiences without becoming overly-difficult to manage.

ASSETs refer to tokens produced by players that build/assemble user-generated content (UGC), and employ the ERC-1155 token standard. These ASSETs are in-turn tradable on the Sandbox marketplace in the form of NFTs, and are chiefly used to serve as creation elements in the context of The Sandbox Game Maker. 

GEMs and CATALYSTs are ERC-20 tokens that characterize Sandbox’s in-game ASSETs on the basis of their tier, scarcity, and related attributes. These tokens provide Asset NFTs with defined utilities that are used within the Sandbox metaverse, with their rarity and scarcity being displayed within the marketplace.

As alluded to previously, SAND is Sandbox’s native utility token employed throughout the ecosystem as the basis of the platform’s transactions, interactions, value transfers, as well as for liquidity provision via staking and governance. SAND and ERC-20 token built on top of the Ethereum blockchain network and has a finite supply of 3,000,000,000 SAND.

SAND is available for transactions on a variety of leading and smaller exchanges, including Binance, Huobi, Uniswap, Kucoin, Gemini, BitMart, MXC, Poloniex, Bithumb, and many more.

How Can You Invest In the Sandbox Real Estate

As the metaverse, including the Sandbox, has boomed in popularity, there has been a massive influx of demand for virtual land/real estate with respect to buying and renting for investment purposes. For more information, download the full report below!

Special Note: This report was written in collaboration with GDA Capital.