Welcome to our Crypto Insider for February 4th, 2022 – FREE Version, brought to you weekly by Alts.
By popular demand, we’re bringing you the smartest insight, analysis, and investing tips for all things Crypto.
Everyone knows about and talks about Bitcoin and Ethereum, but what about the rest of your crypto portfolio? Unless you’re neck-deep in the space, it’s hard to know what to invest in.
That’s why our focus is specifically on coins and projects you may not have heard of. Where to find moon shots before they take off.
This is our fourth issue, and today we’re giving you an overview of Sandbox $SAND, one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrencies in 2021.
Table of Contents
Introduction
We wrote about the different networks and chains in the past couple of issues. With this issue, we decided to switch it up to something a little more fun – a cryptocurrency about the metaverse, which we’re quite bullish on.
Enter The Sandbox. The Sandbox is the 2nd largest Metaverse project, just behind its largest competitor, $MANA Decentraland, which sits in at #1.
While we don’t dig too much into defining the metaverse, it’s essentially a virtual reality or digital online life that’s an alternate to the traditional physical reality. In The Sandbox’s virtual reality, you can spend time with your friends, host parties, spend money, and put on different outfits on your avatar.
For a deeper-dive on The Sandbox, check out our issue on metaverse real estate.
Sandbox $SAND at a glance:
The Sandbox CoinMarketCap – $11.1B
$SAND (at time of writing): $3.72
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheSandboxGame
- Discord:https://discord.com/invite/vAe4zvY
Why It Could Moon
The metaverse has been hyped lately. It’s not a coincidence Facebook has officially rebranded as Meta – in fact, look at their new description:
As the internet becomes increasingly relevant to our lives and people spend more time online, the metaverse becomes more and more real. In fact, Microsoft cited the metaverse as the primary reason for wanting to buy Activision for a whopping $68.7 billion, which is a good sign for all things metaverse, The Sandbox included.
Like any metaverse & game, The Sandbox depends on adoption and the number of users. According to their site, the Sandbox has already welcomed 200k users, which is a great start for a private alpha.
The Sandbox also focuses on strategic partnerships – for example, on Jan 27th, 2022, The Sandbox announced a partnership with Warner Music. Their land will feature live concerts and music experiences – how’s that for a way to spend your $SAND within the metaverse?
The Sandbox also has integrations with plenty of NFTs, which means you could potentially use an NFT you own as an Avatar within The Sandbox. The Sandbox has its own NFT marketplace now – another way for the project to earn revenue and better promote its NFTs.
Click on the link, and you’ll see NFT collections of some household names – Snoop Dogg (featured above), Care Bears, Atari, The Walking Dead, and more. Yeah, The Sandbox is kind of a big deal.
Perhaps the biggest deal of all is the ability to own virtual land in The Sandbox. Land is represented as a series of pixels, of which owners of the land can design to have various images and words like below:
You can showcase graphics such as logos or ads with land, allowing landowners to rent out their land for passive income. However, land isn’t cheap – at the current time of writing, the most affordable land plot is 3.6 $ETH, or about $10,000. There’s a lot you can do with land. In addition to building it out, you can participate in gameplay in The Sandbox. Participation includes hosting games & experiences, renting land, organizing events, and voting on certain decisions around The Sandbox.
Now, you don’t have to own land or participate in the metaverse to make money from $SAND. If you’re like us and just believe in the project and its trajectory, you can just invest in $SAND and hope the token appreciates.
Finally, The Sandbox has some pretty powerful backers in their corner. Leading the charge is SoftBank, a powerful conglomerate headquartered in Japan with plenty of previous successful investments such as Uber, WeWork, and Slack.
The deep-dive
Price
$SAND is more than 50% away from its all-time-high. A big reason for its recent fall was due to more Macroeconomics than with the token itself, as the price of almost all crypto was negatively impacted in the past few months.
While the price has certainly taken a hit, we believe $SAND will go up again in the long run due to the strength and momentum of the project.
Sandbox Project Roadmap
The Sandbox has a roadmap that currently extends to the first quarter of 2023.
Highlights:
- A voting mechanism for The Sandbox stakeholders to help shape the future of the project to become a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
- Virtual concerts launch with popular artists
- The Walking Dead game launches
- Launch of the mobile game
- More partnerships announced
- Launch games platform with 1K+ games
- Game maker launches
Community
The team does a great job of having multiple touch-points with the community with a very active Twitter, Discord, and regular AMAs.
The Sandbox has more than 250,000 members on their Discord, about 4x larger than the discords of other projects we featured. Earlier, we talked about our faith in this project getting adopted. A strong community is a big reason for this. Their Discord is among the most active we’ve seen, which is a great sign and important for a project like this.
Strengths:
- Leading Metaverse project
- Has working model (in private Alpha)
- Partnerships with plenty of large brands (Warner Bros Music) and Artists (Snoop Dogg)
- Has its own NFT collection and marketplace
- Robust engine to build real experiences and games on top of The Sandbox
- Ownership of land allows for passive income
Weaknesses:
- Still early and requires mass adoption for success
- Dependent on more partnerships for continued success
- Plenty of work to do with room to poorly execute or fail
- An increasing amount of metaverse competitors
Competition Analysis
While there is an increasing number of metaverse projects, there is only one really worth mentioning here, and that’s the same project we mentioned in the intro – $MANA, or Decentraland. Decentraland is the first crypto metaverse project and has benefitted from first mover’s advantage.
Like The Sandbox, Decentraland allows you to acquire plots of land to own digital land within its metaverse. Decentraland is actually older than Than Sandbox and has a better working proof of concept. Like the Sandbox, though, it’s still in private alpha.
$MANA currently has a market cap of about $4.8b, compared to $SAND’s market cap of approximately $3.3b. While this suggests $SAND’s upside is only a 50% increase, we’re very confident that more money will move into the metaverse and its various projects. We’ve already mentioned the Activision acquisition, which paves the way for plenty of more big money to move into the space.
How to invest in $SAND
Disclosure: This is not financial advice. This article is for entertainment purposes ONLY. I am a holder of $SAND.
And just a reminder – we don’t go through crypto safety best practices in this section. It is your responsibility to keep your information safe and secure.
Buying $SAND
No need to reinvent the wheel – this piece is a great explainer of how to buy $SAND.
Due to high gas fees, staking $SAND is probably only worth it if you have more than $5k worth.
