Sandbox revealed that it has attracted more than 330,000 unique creators at a time when significant metaverse ventures are finding it difficult to acquire traction after the weak market of 2022–2023.
At a $1 billion valuation, $20 million in convertible promissory notes have been raised by Animoca Brands and its subsidiary Bacasable Global, the company that runs the well-known metaverse platform The Sandbox.
True Global Ventures and LG Tech Ventures were among the investors in the investment round managed by Kingsway Capital. The promissory notes’ holders have the same options as current preference shares to convert them into Bacasable Global’s equity.
The Sandbox intended to seek $400 million at a $4 billion valuation almost two years prior to the most recent investment round, which has a billion-dollar valuation.
The Sandbox stated in an official statement that the most recent investment round will be used to develop the creative economy and its decentralised mobile metaverse platform, which is scheduled to go live in 2025. The Sandbox plans to improve its Game Maker and VoxEdit 3D editing tools in addition to adding new social elements and avatar talents. These are some of the more noteworthy usage.
With its new multiplayer rules system, which is expected to go live in beta later in 2024 before its official release in 2025, the metaverse platform promised to expand gameplay options.
More than 1,000 user-generated experiences have been created since The Sandbox’s Alpha version launched in November 2023. With regard to cryptocurrency wallets, the platform has 5.7 million user accounts.
Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, stated that a lot of well-known games, like Roblox and Minecraft, which have millions of daily players, don’t give their consumers digital property rights. “The evolution of UGC games for the age of digital ownership,” he continued, is what The Sandbox symbolises.
The metaverse economy is expected to reach $5 trillion by 2030, according to investment management firm McKinsey & Company. Reorienting the metaverse hasn’t succeeded in gaining user traction after the initial buzz surrounding the idea, which caused Facebook to completely rebrand. According to a research published in Futurism, in 2022, there were just 38 daily users of Meta’s $1.2 billion metaverse project.
Major metaverse initiatives are finding it difficult to get traction in the wake of the 2022–2023 bear market, but over 330,000 unique creators have downloaded The Sandbox’s no-code Game Maker in the last 12 months, according to the company.