The Sandbox has just managed to raise $20 million despite a general metaverse downturn.
The Sandbox will use the funds to develop its creator economy and mobile metaverse platform, slated for launch in 2025.
The Sandbox is now valued at $1 billion, though lower than its 2022 valuation of $4 billion.
Despite its token's price stagnation, The Sandbox boasts an impressive level of user growth and user-generated content.
The metaverse market is expected to reach $5 trillion by 2030, which could possibly boost The Sandbox's token price.
The word “metaverse” used to be a lot more popular than it currently is.
Metaverse became one of the biggest buzzwords in the 2021 bull run, especially after Facebook’s pivot into Meta in October 2021, its acquisition of Oculus, a leading Virtual Reality headset company, and its heavy investment in the metaverse sector.
Since then, the 2022 bear market came and muddied the waters, making the word “metaverse” as good as forgotten.
This time around, however, it seems that metaverse tech is coming back into action, and The Sandbox is leading the charge.
Right in the middle of the crypto market’s resurgence, The Sandbox, operated by Bacasable Global (another company under Animoca Brands) has been making headlines with a massive milestone now crossed.
According to a recent press release from Animoca, the Sandbox has successfully raised a whopping $20 million via convertible promissory notes and now has a company valuation of $1 billion at the time of writing.
This $20 million fundraising was led by companies like Kingsway Capital, LG Tech Ventures, and True Global Ventures, and offers investors a means to convert their promissory notes into Bacasable Global’s equity.
This $20 billion fund will be used to build a decentralized virtual environment for The Sandbox, that allows users to experience a combination of gaming and events while encouraging the community’s active participation.
These funds will also go towards The Sandbox’s expansion of the creator economy, as well as its 2025 launch of its mobile metaverse platform.
The Sandbox is also set to introduce several new features like social rankings, avatar skills, and better upgrades to its Game Maker and VoxEdit 3D editing tools.
According to data from CoinMarketCap, the protocol’s $SAND token hasn’t seen much growth in terms of price since, and has been stuck under the 50-cent mark for months now.
However, despite this price sluggishness, there has also been a marked rate of growth in the Sandbox as a protocol, with more than 1,000 user-generated experiences since its Alpha launch in November 2023.
Moreover, the platform's recent crypto wallet integration has also attracted nearly 6 million users, which Yat Siu, the co-founder of Animoca Brands has used to emphasise the difference between The Sandbox and other UGC (User-Generated Content) games like Minecraft and Roblox.
Siu in the press release, also states that the Sandbox stands out from the aforementioned UGC games because it offers digital property rights, which is a relatively new concept in this niche.
The Sandbox now has a $1 billion company valuation and has managed to raise around $20 million to scale up the company.
However, its valuation used to be higher.
Back in 2022 with a valuation of $4 billion, the company aimed to raise around $400 million for this same purpose, as highlighted by Yahoo Finance.
At the time, SAND, the platform's native token, was priced at $2.82, with a market cap of $3.27 billion, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
However, this is not the end of the road for metaverse-affiliated companies.
According to Yat Siu (and Investment management firm McKinsey & Company), the metaverse economy is set to grow to $5 trillion by 2030.
The metaverse niche’s performance
Considering how The Sandbox currently holds around $1 billion of the total $13 billion market cap in the metaverse niche (according to Coingecko data), the odds look pretty favourable for the price of $SAND.
The Sandbox’s price action
According to the charts, $SAND seems to have lost its footing above the ascending trendline shown above and is attempting to break above once again, while testing the $0.42 price level.
If we see a decisive break and close above this price level, we just might see a comeback on the cryptocurrency, leading it further up to $0.82 or even higher.
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