Thank you to everyone who joined AMA Blockelite x The Sandbox on 23rd October at 1:30 PM CET I 11:30 AM UTC I 6:30 PM UTC+7. Here is the recap for those who missed this AMA.
Our special guest today is Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox
Segment 1: Introduction about The Sandbox and Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox
Q1: Can you briefly introduce yourself as well as The Sandbox?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Yes of course!
My name is Sébastien Borget, I am the COO, co-founder of The Sandbox (http://sandbox.game).
I’m 35 years old and this is my 4th company, the 3 previous ones have been acquired. I was involved in peer-to-peer technology, mobile gaming and cloud media streaming.
Then at the end of 2017, we have been interested in blockchain technology and especially NFTs, and we found combining it with the User-Generated Content made by the Sandbox players would be the perfect match. (www.blockchaingamealliance.org)
I am an advocate for #NFTs & blockchain in games.
Nice to meet you all!
Tushar – CM of The Sandbox: Let me do a quick intro The Sandbox.
Here’s a Teaser first: https://youtu.be/oi1mis3DGZE
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.
We are combining user-generated content (UGC) with NFTs, enabling anyone to make its own NFTs using VoxEdit (our 3D Editor). Then you can own, trade and monetize these NFTs as you want.
In the coming year, our experienced and dedicated team will build an unique way to play in a virtual world where you can play, create, collect, earn, govern, and own anything in the game.
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: You will be able to enter a virtual world where you can build, own and monetize games, next to gaming giants Atari, Square Enix and more!
this is very exciting
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 & Earn $SAND #Crypto
- Play & Create with huge IPs and Brands
We are thrilled to see the demand for $SAND and also want to confirm our long term vision on building a gaming metaverse. We have great achievements, fantastic team, partners, ips and more. You’ll learn more about it today!
$SAND is now listed on Binance, Huobi, Poloniex, Upbit, Crypto.com, WazirX, WBF, Latoken, TokoCrypto and MXC and it ranks in Top 200-250 tokens on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko
Also inviting you to join our Vietnamese community at https://t.me/thesandboxgamevietnam
Q2: How does The Sandbox game platform work? When can people join, and what are the requirements for joining the platform?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Alright, let’s start with the basics 🙂 At its core, The Sandbox is an ecosystem for Players and Creators, consisting of three main components: a Voxel Editor (named “VoxEdit”), a Marketplace, and the Game itself.
These 3 main components are:
First VOXEDIT: it is a 3D modeling and animating package that allows users to create and animate 3D objects such as people, animals, foliage, and tools. = our NFT maker
Then the MARKETPLACE: it allows users to upload, publish, and sell their ASSETS made in VoxEdit, as Non-Fungible Tokens (Both ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens).
And finally the GAME MAKER: it allows players to build 3D games for free. With the help of pre-assigned behaviors and visual settings, no coding knowledge is required.
The Sandbox is an ecosystem for Players and Creators, consisting of three main components: a Voxel Editor (named “VoxEdit”), a Marketplace, and the Game itself.
What can players do?
We are preparing a MMO-RPG inspired gameplay, where players will need to complete quests across the map (kill enemies, collect items etc), either in lands made by players or in procedurally generated lands.
Players can collect tokens and resources and trade them with other players, creators, artists etc on the platform.
This business model is called play-to-earn, as anything they collect in the game is truly owned by players, they can trade it to other players (inside the marketplace or outside on other websites), transfer it to other players or even resell it through our currency $SAND.
We will be opening the public beta of the game in December 2020.
Blockelite Host: Who controls the game, if it violates a provision?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Our team is monitoring all the content published and can act to remove the content from display
Blockelite Host: Great , thank you
Can be exchanged for Sand Token? Sand is erc-20, right?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Yes you can sell your ASSETS which are NFTs on the marketplace for SAND tokens.
SAND is the main utility token of the platform, it’s a medium of exchange, as well as governance and staking token
Q3: SAND is the utility token used for The Sandbox ecosystem. What can I do with the SAND tokens? How can people earn SAND tokens?
Tushar – CM of The Sandbox: $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.
Also, our fee capture model is important, as a total of 26.5% of all SAND transaction volume goes back into the Foundation and for Staking Rewards
And of course, users can earn $SAND by participating in the platform. Every user contributes to value of our ecosystem
How can you earn $SAND by creating and playing?
- 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.
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox:
Tushar – CM of The Sandbox: You can learn more about our SAND/ETH liquidity mining pool here http://staking.sandbox.game
https://medium.com/sandbox-game/introducing-sand-liquidity-mining-b56e99fe2261
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox:
In Phase 1, we are launching our SAND Liquidity Mining program with 1,500,000 SAND fixed amount per month distributed in Rewards
In Phase 2, in the coming weeks, we will introduce Yield multipliers based on LAND NFTs ownership.
Blockelite Host: very detailed 🙂 thank you
Tushar – CM of The Sandbox: SAND is the official currency of our project!
Better to be detailed about it
Blockelite Host: you’ve run a promo and ama a lot, so I think there’s a campaign coming up
Tushar – CM of The Sandbox: Exciting news coming up soon about the campaign and more to follow!
You can subscribe to our announcement channel to be the first one to know about it : https://t.me/sandboxnews
Q4: As can be seen, The Sandbox game is very similar to the Minecraft game. What’s the difference you make? What strategy makes The Sandbox game fully decentralized and get mass adoption by millions of users?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Minecraft was my favorite game before I knew crypto
With Minecraft Minecraft is a game that has been here for more than 10 years now they have over 100M monthly active users However, in the current game market, the centralized ownership and control of user-generated content limits creator rights and ownership. Players and Creators cannot trade the virtual goods and digital assets they purchased or won in games.
Anything you make i Minecraft is NOT yours you can’t take it out, transfer it or monetize it the way you want
With The Sandbox, we aim to overcome these limitations by building a decentralized gaming platform where creators are able to craft, play, share, collect, and trade without central control, enjoying secure ownership with the ability to earn cryptocurrency (SAND).
This ownership will be established and guaranteed through the use of NFTs, where every in-game item will have a unique and immutable blockchain identifier.
Blockelite Host: Yes, Minecraft is popular game, but we can not earn money in that 🙂
Mind if I say SAND is an upgrade of Minecraft?
Tushar – CM of The Sandbox: No better way to earn while doing what you love to do!
And Sandbox has everything you need for that
Blockelite Host: Minecraft + blockchain = SAND ?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: I think it’s even better
Game Maker + NFTs + SAND = the Metaverse !
Blockelite Host:
Atari owns a large land, are they your partner? Or just an investor?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: The Sandbox secured 60 partnerships with award-winning game companies such as Atari and Square Enix, top decentralized games such as Crypto Kitties, major brands such as Care Bears and Shaun the Sheep to build a fun, creative “play-to-earn” Gaming platform, owned and made by players.
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.
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.
So stay tuned ! Each of these partners, receive LANDS on our map
Tushar – CM of The Sandbox: You can read about it here : https://medium.com/sandbox-game/partnership-announcement-the-sandbox-ft-atari-c0a828ed32c5
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Imagine a virtual world where you can play, build, own and monetize games, next to gaming giants Atari, Square Enix and more!
This is our vision, to bring mainstream gaming companies and IPs into using blockchain gaming and NFTS
Atari is a partner
Square Enix is an investor
Q5: What are the major milestones The Sandbox achieved so far?
Tushar – CM of The Sandbox: Great questions – we have many achievements and more to be announced. Here’s below an overview
We have been for 8 years already in the video game industry!
The Sandbox project has been around since 2012 on mobile platforms and has gathered more than 40 million global installs on mobile.
We’ve been working since July 2018 (2 years ago) on the new version of the game, 3D, multiplayer, multi-platform and using blockchain technology to offer a virtual world built on the Ethereum blockchain, where players can build, own, and monetize their gaming experiences.
We’ve raised $4.5M USD from reputable investors on our Seed Round, including from Hashed (#1 cryptofund in Korea, True Global Ventures and Square Enix the video game company)
We’ve sold for more than $1,750,000 worth of #NFTs, our LANDS (ERC-721) over 4 presales, some of them finishing within minutes to a few hours with high demand. The last Presale 4 Round 1 introduced premium lands and assets and sold out 75% in 1 hour for reference on August 4th.
We‘ve launched in October 2019 a $2,000,000 usd Game Makers Fund. This Fund will soon be in $SAND and managed by the Foundation, which supports the ecosystem of The Sandbox, offering grants to incentivize high quality content and game production on the platform.
As of today the Foundation has funded over 17 game projects and granted 100 artists to produce NFTs.
We have a large community of over 750,000 members over Discord, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. And 50 ambassadors actively engaged in supporting our community and promoting our vision — that is really exciting!
VoxEdit, launched in December 2018 has been downloaded more than 100,000.
Hundreds of artists use it to produce thousands of assets published on our marketplace.
The platform has also secured 60 partnerships with award-winning game companies such as Atari and Square Enix, top decentralized games such as Crypto Kitties, major brands such as Care Bears and Shaun the Sheep to build a fun, creative “play-to-earn” Gaming platform, owned and made by players.
And you’re invited to join as well to be part of our project:
https://t.me/sandboxgame
Segment 2: 5 best questions from twitter
Q1: Speed is one of the important factors on the gaming industry. And we see that on blockchain like Ethereum, requires a very high fee now, how will the sandbox solve this scaling platform? from @kiwi2062
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox:
– The Sandbox uses the Ethereum blockchain to prove the ownership of the games and assets
– When you are playing or creating, you are in the game. There is no interaction with the blockchain or transactions required. So if we have 1M players, it doesn’t mean the number of transaction is linearly or exponentially growing, it could remain stable.
– While there is no direct relationship between number of games, number of players and number of blockchain transactions, we have already prepared for the scalability through a partnership with Matic Network, who is a layer-2 solution that can help scale further https://medium.com/sandbox-game/partnership-announcement-the-sandbox-ft-matic-eaa2ebd05f9f
Q2: How will Sandbox bring mainstream attention to its technology? How does Sandbox strive to become a leader in mass adoption of blockchain platforms? from @@yuriycrypto
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox:
We do believe millions of players are interested in exploring the benefits of decentralization, interoperability, and the creator’s ecosystem.
We do have local communities that we are growing as we speak; Korean, Chinese, Turkish, Vietnamese, Spanish, Indonesian, French, Thai, Filipino, Italian and so on!
We also have a strong track record of building and delivering on our roadmap — before introducing the tokens.
We didn’t launch a token first, we actually have built for 2 years, launched all our product in Alpha, got a community around them
We are creating an appealing gaming metaverse that aims at attracting all types of people: young & old players, casual & pro gamers, newbie creators & professional artists.
Making a game that is fun, visually appealing and has good mechanics so you want to stay and keep playing it for a long time is our priority
Players will not come for the technology, but for the fun and the experience. Then they can benefit from the advantages offered by our decentralized model, collecting tokens, earning rewards and being able to trade game items, their creations, lands etc
Then, besides make a great game – we have a clear growth strategy, based on
– Partnering with content companies to onboard well-known IPs.
– Conducting LAND token sales to promote the generation of user-created content.
– Conducting AMAs to educate the community.
– Constantly engaging with the public on social media channels.
– Marketing and User Acquisition to gamers, which we have experience with since we have been 8. years in the industry of games
Through the brands and their fans, we can reach mainstream gamers and creators through their favorite brands.
Bring leading gaming Brands & IPs and leverage on those key brands building great experiences as well as trust.
Check a few examples
of projects part of our game maker fund
– Planet Rifft: https://gamemakersandbox.substack.com/p/game-maker-creations-7f5
– Hack The Tao: https://gamemakersandbox.substack.com/p/game-maker-creations-4bf
– Tombs of Treasures: https://gamemakersandbox.substack.com/p/game-maker-creations-1cd
– Dethrone: https://gamemakersandbox.substack.com/p/game-maker-creations-f6b – https://youtu.be/dWa9coxNrK4
– Sweet Village: https://gamemakersandbox.substack.com/p/game-maker-creations-de6
– Uncharted World: https://gamemakersandbox.substack.com/p/game-maker-creations-412
– Viking Fjord: https://gamemakersandbox.substack.com/p/game-maker-creations-0b2
Q3: Would you mention some highlights of the team behind Sandbox? What is your backgrounds and experience in SandBox Gaming platfom and ensure its vision and future development? from @groupcoinfee
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Yes of course
We have many achievements and more to be announced. Here’s an overview
We have been in the video game industry for 8 years already !
We have assembled the right senior team who has experienced in building games for millions of players that last for years with liveops the team has now been growing to 70 people
The Sandbox project has been around since 2012 on mobile platforms and has gathered more than 40 million global installs on mobile.
We’ve raised $4.5M USD from reputable investors on our Seed Round, including from Hashed (#1 cryptofund in Korea, True Global Ventures and Square Enix the video game company)
We’ve sold for more than $1,750,000 worth of #NFTs, our LANDS (ERC-721) over 4 presales, some of them finishing within minutes to a few hours with high demand.
We‘ve launched in October 2019 a $2,000,000 usd Game Makers Fund. This Fund will soon be in $SAND and managed by the Foundation, which supports the ecosystem of The Sandbox, offering grants to incentivize high quality content and game production on the platform.
As of today the Foundation has funded over 17 game projects and granted 100 artists to produce NFTs.
We have a large community of over 750,000 members over Discord, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. And 50 ambassadors actively engaged in supporting our community and promoting our vision — that is really exciting!
And you’re invited to join as well https://t.me/sandboxgame
Q4: With SAND, can users increase the value of their land and assets in the game? How to get high income when trading land and assets owned? from @egorcrypto
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox:
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
Blockchain (tg://search_hashtag?hashtag=Blockchain) games are inherently community-driven, by putting their native tokens and #NFTs (tg://search_hashtag?hashtag=NFTs) into the players hands.
In The Sandbox, every member of the community is contributing to the value of the ecosystem through its participation: LAND owners, Artists, Game Creators, SAND owners, curators and more
and they get rewarded for this contribution as real stakeholders
so their time and efforts is really transformed into value and growing the ecosystem
Q5: Is knowledge of writing codes required for developers to integrate cryptocurrencies into their games and applications? What tools does the Sandbox offer to the developers of new games? from @cryptomatvey
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox:
Our approach is to turn players into makers and allow game creation to anyone, very accessible. No code or programming knowledge is actually required to get started with The Sandbox and you can see artists make their own games with us
Our game maker is really accessible to every one
Our tools enable us to create games and all sorts of experiences without any programming knowledge, it’s all drag and drop — no code !
Segment 3: Live questions
1. Any small coding error can permanently damage the entire assets of the LPs. This is the biggest risk of Yield Farming . How will you deal with this problem? Has your smart contract been audited by any blockchain system ?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: This is a good question and yes, all our smart contracts have been audited, sometimes even twice, by 2 very reputable security companies: Certik and Solidified
you can find all our smart contracts and audits at https://github.com/thesandboxgame/sandbox-smart-contracts/tree/master/documentation/audits
2. Why Sandbox needs so many NFTs? Why do you chose create them instead of use the $SAND to all ?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Each of our Tokens has a specific role in The Sandbox platform, as we went over before
Having different tokens (virtual items, currencies) is the norm in videogames
and all the different type of tokens in The Sandbox are working together to provide a circular economy between all the different users on the platform
3. I see a lot of big companies like Atari Games, Enimoca, Square Enix are SandBox partners. This is really great! But my question: What are the next major partnerships and announcements we can expect from the SandBox project?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: we are about to announce more major partnerships 🙂 Stay tuned !!
Family friendly brands, major game studios, major crypto artists, hollywood movie license
Artists and Celebrities
4. When do you expect your SandBox to be downloadable to smart phones and other mobile devices? Are you already working on it?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Good question! Right now The Sandbox is available on PC and Mac
Our roadmap can be found at www.sandbox.game/roadmap
We are aiming to become one of the leading established key players in the space of virtual worlds with blockchain-based digital LANDS, reaching over 1,000,000 MAUs over the next five years. To achieve this, we will be working on:
Next 6 months:
Game Maker – Official Release 1.0 and major updates with more gaming packages, Behaviors and Visual Scripting
Partnerships – New IPs and Premium NFTs to be announced
Foundation – Launch of the Foundation DAO with SAND staking for voting on Creators Fund management
Next 1 year:
Multi-platforms – Availability of Game on smartphones and tablets devices
Multiplayer – First user-generated games with multiplayer modes
Next 3 years:
Game Maker – Co-Building Mode – creating games with Friends, Custom Scripting with programming 3rd layer and major updates with more gaming packages and Behaviors
Games Platform – Over 1,000 Games available by 2022
Game Maker – Major updates with more gaming packages and behaviors added
Events – Additional Seasons with big rewards to earn
5. What is play-to-earn? How can I monetize my time and activities with $SAND as a player?
Sebastien Borget – COO & Co-Founder of The Sandbox: Definitiely a good question! Play-2-earn is a key part in The sandbox
where as a player you can access for free and collect tokens and rewards as you win in games
Our AMA session is now over !!!
More information about The Sandbox
Website: https://www.sandbox.game/
Telegram: https://t.me/sandboxgame
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesandboxgame
