Original - Odaily

Editor - Loopy Lu

Recently, the GameFi sector has experienced a resurgence. As a star project in the GameFi field in the past, Ronin has also been making frequent moves in recent months.

Coingecko market data shows that the RON token has reached a new high during the year and is currently quoted at $1.79, with a 24-hour increase of approximately 18%.

Yesterday, a rumor about Ronin and The Sandbox began to circulate in the market. As a veteran Metaverse project, The Sandbox seems to be planning to migrate to the Ronin chain. Although this news has not yet been officially announced, related speculations still attract peoples attention to these two projects.

Ronins surprise appearance of SAND sparks reverie

Recently, an old piece of on-chain information was suddenly unearthed by the community. On-chain information shows that a mysterious address has deployed SAND tokens on the Ronin testnet and made multiple transfers.

Following the clue of the browser, we can find that the wallet that initiated the SAND transfer is ronin:eb6d18bc9d2c80308e6224de78062453364cec1d. The RON tokens in this wallet with the tail number ec1d ultimately come from a Ronin network address with the domain name Seb.ron.

To be clear, currentlyno conclusive evidence yetIndicates that the Seb.ron address is an official member of The Sandbox.

Although the identity of the address Seb.ron cannot be confirmed, many community members have commented on itSpeculate, speculating that the person is Sebastian Borget, co-founder and CEO of The Sandbox.

This move may mean that The Sandbox is about to migrate to Ronin.

With good news coming out frequently, can the SAND token be saved?

Although this news has not yet been confirmed, the news still sparked the imagination of the community. If The Sandbox does move to Ronin, what impact will it have on these two products?

Recently,The Sandbox is full of action. In the early hours of this morning Beijing time, The Sandbox has just updated the Game Maker version and released the latest version 0.9. In this version, more tools and creative space are provided for creators.

The new version brings users more possibilities for rich gameplay, including puzzles, resource management, loot and other game types. In addition, the new version also introduces many functions such as NFT access control.

For players, the new version also adds a number of strategic improvements to the game, and new tools such as collision correctors and rendering range limiters can also help creators optimize the game experience.

In addition to the version update,The Sandbox has also made a lot of achievements recently in terms of cooperation, and has reached a number of cooperations in the past month alone.. New collaborations with The Sandbox since November include:

• In cooperation with the Korea Creative Content Agency, a Metaverse diorama pop-up store themed on the TV series Strange Lawyer Woo Young-woo was held.

• Launching a new virtual community called Cinerama, which houses Hollywoods biggest names including The Walking Dead, Black Mirror, Razor Kicks and Cheech and Chong.

• Luxury brand Gucci has entered The Sandbox and launched the Gucci Cosmos Land experience.

• Aave ecological NFT game Aavegotchi announced a partnership with The Sandbox to release a new game Ripples of the Gotchiverse.

• French clothing brand Lacoste announced a strategic partnership with The Sandbox. The Sandbox team will collaborate with Lacoste to create the Lacoste World Tour.

In early November, The Sandbox also officially announced its upcoming ecological fund. Expected to launch in 2024, The Sandbox will launch a Game Maker Fund of 100 million SAND tokens, with a DAO-based selection system that will reward not only creation and content, but the engagement it generates within the platform.

But is such frequent action reflected in The Sandbox’s market value?

(Source of SAND token price trend in the past 1 year: CoinGecko)

From a short-term perspective, the SAND token has been growing by leaps and bounds in recent days. A year-long decline appears to have ended. But a premise that cannot be ignored is that the encryption market has been improving overall recently, and token prices have generally risen. If we use BTC as a price reference, the SAND token’s decline still appears to be over.

(Source of SAND/BTC price trend in the past 1 year: CoinGecko)

At present, the price performance of SAND tokens is not excellent, and can even be said to be quite mediocre. If The Sandbox is indeed as speculated by the community, it can be migrated to the Ronin chain, which may bring new blood to The Sandbox.

Ronins sudden rise

While The Sandbox has underperformed, Ronin has emerged as a major player in the recent GameFi resurgence.

In mid-October, Ronin Network announced the launch of the Lucas (v2.6.2) upgrade and Shillin hard fork on the Ronin mainnet, and recommended that users running validators or RPC nodes on the mainnet upgrade to the Lucas version.

At the end of October, the Shillin hard fork was completed. This version implements Optimistic Fast Finality (REP-0003) and multiple REP-0002 protocol improvements. Among them, REP-0003 proposes a new fast finalization mechanism aimed at improving the speed of transaction confirmation on Ronin; REP-0002 describes the process of moving Bridge to an independent application on Ronin, which will allow Bridge to be managed by its own A set of operators to operate without the need for validators to function.

This hard fork of Ronin introduces a voting process to accelerate block finalization. The finalization time for a block has been reduced from 45 seconds to 6 seconds.

After this upgrade, Ronin’s ecological development and currency price have achieved outstanding performance.

Let’s start with the business outside of gaming. In mid-November, Ronin Domain Name Service (RNS) was launched for public sale. In early December, the Ronin Network introduced the DeFi protocol Impossible Finance, and the project will deploy Launchpad on the Ronin Network. Products launched on this Launchpad may require tokens such as RON, AXS, and IDIA to be staked for distribution.

Similarly, the cooperation between Ronin Wallet and Binance Pay was officially announced a few days ago, and the “recharge from Binance” function has been integrated into the Ronin Wallet mobile app. This means that users can convert assets held on Binance into assets on the Ronin chain, such as converting BTC, ETH and other tokens into AXS, SLP and USDC on Ronin.

With various favorable blessings, the RON token is indeed performing well.

Coingecko data shows that RON has created good gains whether it is USD-based or BTC-based.

And if we extend the time to this year, RON has hit a new high during the year. The current price of $1.79 is already higher than the high of $1.42 set in April this year.

But what is the connection between the various benefits of RON and The Sandbox? Can it lead to the recovery of The Sandbox?

Polygon Escape? Is migration the antidote?

In addition to the positive stimulus and the resurgence of the GameFi sector, the current rise in RON tokens is also a main factor driving growth. The performance of on-chain data is also a major factor driving growth.

In recent months,The move to the Ronin network seemed to be a whirlwind, multiple games have officially announced this plan.

In early November this year, Ronin developer Sky Mavis reached a cooperation with Korean game developer ACT Games, planning to introduce all ACT games to the Ronin Network.

The Zoids Wild Arena TCG, which is still in beta, was originally deployed at Polygon and has now been moved to Ronin. The team stated that they are optimistic about Ronin’s performance in the gaming field, saying, “Ronin Network is a network designed specifically for gaming.”

Not just migration;Several new games have also been announced for future deployments on Ronin。

On the 6th of this month, Ronin also announced a partnership with Singaporean game developer Foonie Magus. The partnership will see the company bring its new game “Apeiron” to the Ronin blockchain. A demo of Apeiron is available on the Epic Game Store, with a mobile version expected to launch globally in the first quarter of 2024.

Some games that migrated earlier have announced their recent data performance.

At the end of October, Pixels, a P2E MMO game focused on the Metaverse, migrated to Ronin Network. According to previous news, Pixels has completed a US$2.4 million seed round of financing, led by Animoca Brands and PKO Investments. The product was deployed on the Polygon network. In mid-November, Ronin and Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin posted on the X platform that the number of Pixels daily active addresses has exceeded 100,000.

An interesting coincidence is that almost all of the migrated games mentioned above were originally located on the Polygon network, and The Sandbox is precisely the flagship metaverse product of the Polygon network.

Source: The Sandbox Documentation

It needs to be emphasized again that the current situation regarding The SandboxmigrateJustcommunity speculationandcommunity discussion. But the exodus of Polygon games is indeed happening more than once.

As for The Sandbox, the earliest game deployed based on Ethereum, it has already experienced a migration to Polygon. Will the story of Mengs mother moved three times happen in The Sandbox?

DeFiLlama data shows that the current TVL of the Ronin chain is US$124 million, which has reached a new high for the year.

It is difficult for us to judge whether more game migrations have brought more users to Ronin, or whether the prosperity of the Ronin ecosystem has attracted more project parties. Although it is impossible to judge the cause and effect relationship, the current phenomenon is obvious-Ronin took off earlier in this GameFi resurgence.

And if the migration really happens as the community speculates, can Ronins ecosystem save The Sandbox, which has been weak in this round of craze?