An article to understand the two leading players in the metaverse, The Sandbox and Decentraland

Author｜Leno
Produced | Vernacular Blockchain (ID: hellobtc)

Recently, the blockchain game platform The Sandbox announced: "Adidas Originals, a subsidiary of German sportswear giant Adidas, has joined the ranks of The Sandbox metaverse."

It is reported that in The Sandbox, players can play to earn by completing tasks, and purchase NFT assets in the game, and NFT assets include virtual land.

This is another metaverse layout following the partnership between Adidas Originals and Coinbase, which once again ignited the heat of the metaverse.first level title

01 
The metaverse is forming a real market

First of all, it is necessary to analyze the market performance of the Metaverse concept. The Metaverse is forming a real market.

At the end of 2020, Tencent founder Ma Huateng stated that Quanzhen Internet is the next battle that Tencent must win;

In July 2021, Facebook founder Zuckerberg announced that in the next five years, Facebook will be transformed into a metaverse company and Facebook will be renamed "META";

In August 2021, Bytedance acquired Pico, a VR software and hardware company, for 9 billion yuan.

The metaverse has come out of "science fiction" and is combining the current development status of the InternetForm another "real world" that is parallel to the real world and highly interoperable with the real world.

Blockchain technology, as the technology of confirming the rights of virtual assets and system mapping in the Metaverse, is becoming the basic structure of the Metaverse in the future.Therefore, the digital assets generated around NFT and blockchain games are also highly valued by traditional capital.

It is undeniable that when the metaverse gradually becomes a real market, the economic interests and investment directions behind it are already quite obvious. Working on the real reason to combine the two.

The Sandbox and Decentraland are two of the top-ranked and popular projects of "DeFi + NFT".first level title

02 
The Sandbox

At the beginning of November, The Sandbox not only received $93 million in Series B financing, but also attracted Adidas Originals to "buy land".

As a Metaverse game built on the Ethereum blockchain, The Sandbox's performance in the casting, collection, earning, and governance of game characters, props and other related NFTs is the value accumulation of the unlimited open sandbox game of the Blockchain Metaverse model.

LAND represents the limited number of digital real estate in The Sandbox, with a limit of 166,464 plots so that each real estate forms a unique NFT under the ERC-721 protocol.

Owning a plot means owning the ownership of the virtual land assets in The Sandbox game. The owner can design and operate the land by himself, or resell it to others through the market to earn the difference.

As a community-driven virtual gaming platform, The Sandbox builds a decentralized virtual world game around NFT.

Players can confirm the rights to metaverse resources in The Sandbox by purchasing land and other assets in the ecosystem. They can also independently cast NFT in the game and use it for transactions. They have partial autonomy in the game universe. By organizing competitions and activities, Even create your own games to form a diversified Metaverse world.

Therefore, the threshold of The Sandbox is relatively low. Even users who do not understand programming can create a "small metaverse" based on the sandbox universe through the modular composition provided by the platform.

Whether young or old, casual or professional, players don't play games because of "skills" but because games are fun and a good experience.

According to statistics, The Sandbox currently has 40 million downloads, more than 1 million monthly active users, a total turnover of more than 144 million US dollars, more than 500,000 users connected to the wallet, and has established IP partnerships with more than 165 brands.

These include Snoop Dogg, The Walking Dead, The Smurfs, Care Bears, Atari, and CryptoKitties, and create voxelized versions of their worlds and characters in the Metaverse (a voxel is a three-dimensional version of a pixel).

The NFT value of the virtual land in The Sandbox has also shown a skyrocketing trend, and the increase of a single plot has exceeded 5 times.In the official roadmap, the development direction of The Sandbox has been determined:

Technical level: realize the availability of multiple platforms, support devices such as mobile phones and tablets, and realize multi-player mode;

Economic model: Gradually transfer to DAO, so that players can participate in decision-making to obtain benefits;

Platform operation: continue to sell land regularly, hold a series of incentive activities, attract content creators, improve internal ecology, and reach 1 million users within 2 years;

Cooperation level: reach cooperation with more games and build The Sandbox as a game platform. In 2023, 5,000 games will be available in The Sandbox.

It can be seen from the above roadmap that the ultimate goal of The Sandbox team is to build it into a complete sandbox platform, and its structure will become Ethereum in the blockchain metaverse.

The Sandbox is becoming the mainstream system of an NFT-based, open metaverse, where the content, economy, and even governance will be in the hands of players, creators, and users who contribute to this virtual world.

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03 
Decentraland

The biggest difference between Decentraland and The Sandbox is that it has a more profound blockchain background. The similarity is that they are both sandbox platforms based on the blockchain metaverse, and both have shown an extremely intense upward trend recently.

Compared with the previous generation of Ethereum-style chain games,The playability of Decentraland has been greatly improved, and the financial attributes are also stronger after adding DeFi gameplay, and generalized to trendy products, music and other fields, and with the addition of big IP, it will bring greater leverage and an experience worth looking forward to.

Simply put, Decentraland can be regarded as a new metaverse in the blockchain field, and it is the first VR platform built on Ethereum.

From a performance point of view, Decentraland is closer to the Internet metaverse, and users can earn benefits by creating, experiencing, and developing NFT and related programs on the Decentraland platform.

By purchasing the blockchain land ledger, you can obtain your own "territory". In the territory, the owner has absolute rights to the territory and can release interactive systems ranging from static 3D scenes to games.

Posted content is not supervised by anyone,At the same time, no one can prevent the owner from entering the domain he owns. This concept is the best manifestation of the confirmation of virtual assets in the Metaverse.

Decentraland is a decentralized VR platform based on Ethereum and one of the old NFT projects. Players can trade and mint NFTs in the virtual world built by Decentraland, and they can also socialize within a certain range.

On Decentraland, the limited and tradable 3D virtual space is called LAND,It is a non-homogeneous digital asset controlled by an Ethereum smart contract (it can be regarded as an NFT).

Each piece of land is marked with precise coordinates, and the owner's information is recorded on the blockchain and cannot be tampered with. The area of ​​each plot is 10m*10m. Limited by the scene and other factors, the plot belongs to the owner permanently.

At the same time, the "territory" has a free attribute, and the owner of the territory can create a 3D interactive scene and form a main community or a consensus community.

Most importantly,The Decentraland platform can provide users with a virtual world to earn income, both content creators and territory owners can pay for content through content creation and content display, and territory owners can also invite more people to participate in improving their "territory".

Territory owners with more "users" can also promote products for other projects by charging "advertising fees", Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) allows users to participate in the creation and operation of the virtual world. In order to solve the expansion problem, reduce transaction costs and improve transaction speed.

Currently, Decentraland has established partnerships with several blockchain projects, such as Aragon, Coral, district0x, etc.Judging from the official information released, the development direction of Decentraland is as follows:

Technical level: Build the first Metaverse fully autonomous by users, and it can be integrated into interactive 3D in the future.

Economic model: The user's territorial ownership is recorded using blockchain technology to ensure its scarcity and anti-counterfeiting.

Platform operation: Users can purchase land through the Ethereum blockchain platform and become land owners.

Cooperation level: Microsoft Mixed Reality Platform (MR) has been supported and cooperation intentions have been reached with more projects.

summary

04 
summary

The Sandbox and Decentraland have opened up two different new spaces of the metaverse, but they have chosen the "territory" division model of the virtual world by different means. With participation, the metaverse we long for is being realized step by step.