Sandbox raises $20M at $1B valuation, promises to expand creative economy
Animoka Brands and its subsidiary, Baxable Global, have raised $20 million of convertible promissory notes for the popular metaverse platform, The Sandbox, at a value of $1 billion.
Investors can convert notes into equity.
The funding round was led by Kingsway Capital and included LG Tech Ventures and True Global Ventures. Holders of the promissory notes may convert them into Bacasable Global's equity in the same manner as the existing preference shares.
The latest funding round, valued at $1 billion, comes nearly two years after The Sandbox planned to raise $400 million at a $4 billion valuation.
In its official announcement, The Sandbox said its latest round of funding will be used to expand its creator economy and decentralized mobile Metaverse platform, which is expected to launch in 2025.
Among the most notable uses, Sandbox seeks to add new social features and modeling capabilities, and to improve its Game Maker and VoxEdit 3D editing tools.
The Metaverse platform promises to expand gameplay options with a new multiplayer rules system in beta in 2024 before a general release in 2025.
Sandstone, despite the depression, sees significant growth
More than 1,000 user-generated experiences have been developed since Sandbox's alpha version went live in November 2023. The platform holds 5.7 million user accounts linked to cryptocurrency wallets.
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Yat Siu, founder of Animoka Brands, said that many popular games with millions of daily users, such as Minecraft and Roblox, do not grant digital property rights to their users. He added that The Sandbox represents the “advancement of UGC games for the age of digital ownership.”
Investment management firm McKinsey & Company has presented its Metabis economy project, which will grow to 5 trillion dollars by 2030. However, despite early buzz around the concept of Facebook undergoing a complete branding overhaul, the change to MetaVass failed to find a post-bull run of users. According to a report by Futurism, Meta's $1.2 billion Metaverse project had only 38 daily users in 2022.
As major metaverse projects struggle to gain traction following the 2022 to 2023 bear market, The Sandbox reports an increase of over 330,000 unique creators who downloaded Sandbox's no-code Game Maker in the past 12 months.
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