Significant partnerships with luxury brands and entertainment figures and a focus on developing new experiences and events helped The Sandbox endure a prolonged cryptocurrency bear market.
Co-founder Sébastien Borget and CEO Arthur Madrid spoke exclusively to Cointelegraph at NFT Paris about renewed interest in the metaverse platform’s native token, new partnerships with the likes of Gucci and Lacoste, and its long-term goals to remain the home of virtual experiences in the Web3 space.
“People enjoy saying the metaverse is dead, but it’s definitely not for us. For Facebook, it’s not. If you listen to Tim Sweeney at Epic, he is also extremely bullish on the metaverse. Having a metaverse with crypto, with NFTs [nonfungible tokens] and avatars, it’s still very meaningful,” Madrid explains.
A recent report published by cryptocurrency market intelligence firm Messari highlights a renewed interest in The Sandbox’s (SAND) token and the platform itself. SAND’s circulating market cap increased by 89% to $1.2 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, up from $649 million, outperforming the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies in the same quarter.
Messari State of The Sandbox. Source: Messari on X
Meanwhile, activities including creating and trading in-game assets and experiences, excluding Sandbox LAND sales, grew significantly. Daily average active non-LAND buyers were up 73%, non-LAND mints grew by 233%, while daily average non-LAND secondary sales and daily average non-LAND secondary volume were up by 173% and 78% respectively in Q4, 2023.
The Sandbox also secured new partnerships with luxury brands and companies like Warner Music Group and its Notorious B.I.G avatar collection, Japanese software developer Drecom and Singapore media conglomerate MediaCorp.
An eye on new markets
Borget said the company has a history of building in the depths of cryptocurrency bear markets. The Sandbox was born in 2018 as Bitcoin (BTC) and cryptocurrencies crashed in the wake of market highs in late 2017.
“We tried to ship…
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