Perhaps because I knew Sebastien Borget and the Pixowl team back in the days they were making The Sandbox as a 2D mobile game franchise, I’ve been interested in the current version of The Sandbox.
Conceptually at least, it’s just Minecraft-on-the-blockchain, and what could be more simple or exciting than that.
Of course, nothing could be more complex than building Minecraft-on-a-blockchain and that’s something underlined by the launch of the Alpha version.
It was originally planned to go live in February but Ethereum gas costs and issues arising with migrating smart contracts to Polygon caused delays. (The latter are still a work-in-process apparently.)
And yet - as demonstrated by the massive price velocity of the Sand token and its Land NFTs over the past month since Facebook rebranded to Meta - this has been perfect timing for a project that was calling itself a metaverse back in 2019.
So, sure, there’s still a long way to go until all the elements of The Sandbox - building interactive experiences, allowing creators to sell in-game assets, and all the associated tokenomics - are live.
But my personal opinion is that assuming it launches sometime in 2022, it has a great opportunity to be the first metaverse worthy the title.
Funding News:
Former Citigroup exec Matt Zhang has launched Hivemind Capital Partners. It’s a $1.5 billion fund focusing on crypto investments including play-2-earn. That activity will be led by former Goldman Sachs analyst Sam Peurifoy (aka ‘Das Kapitalist’ and active in the Axie community.)
Active blockchain game investor Galaxy Digital has refuelled with the private placement of $500 million in convertible bonds. The bonds are due to mature on 15 December 2026 on a Delware holding company Galaxy Digital has just formed.
These announcement follows similar large scale raises including Andreessen Horowitz’s $2.2 billion crypto fund (June) and Paradigm’s $2.5 billion fund (November).
Not blockchain (yet), but Icelandic startup Mainframe Industries has raised $22.9 million led by Andreessen Horowitz to build out its vision for cloud gaming.
The company is led by CCP, Remedy and Next Game veterans while the CEO is Thor Gunnarsson, who has a long track record in mobile gaming, including Plain Vanilla Games, which was a pioneer in F2P trivia games. (Anyone remember QuizUp?)
Product News:
Backed by orgs including Yield Guild, cross-platform blockchain MOBA Thetan Arena is now live (including via Google Play and Apple App Store). I haven’t played it yet, but I sucked at the beta version (as I suck at all MOBAs).
As I wrote yesterday, there’s a lot of pent-up demand for P2E games so it will be interesting to see how Thetan Arena does. As far as I can understand, the P2E element is mainly NFT-based but the THG token is up 85% over the past 30 days, down 6.5% yesterday so make of that what you will. Recent reviews on Google Play are also fairly negative.
Recommended:
Check out Undra - a 2D MMOG from UK startup Studio Decent - which is building early community with ARG-style experiences. (We’re going to see more of this.)
I love the art style and the first NFT drop on Ethereum starts 1 December (you have to reserve your spot first).
More blockchain games should be like this - less shilly.