The Sandbox, a blockchain-based virtual world, is doing well, according to Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands Corp., which owns most of the digital game. This is despite a report that the platform only had about 500 daily active users.
The Sandbox, which has thought about raising money at a valuation of more than $4 billion, would be surprised to see so few users. In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Siu said that the CoinDesk report was based only on data about blockchain transactions. He said that these transactions, which can include the sale of nonfungible tokens that represent virtual land, don’t show how much people are using the platform as a whole because more people are keeping their NFTs so they can use them in the game rather than selling them.
He said that comparing this metric to the number of people in the United States would be like saying that “how many people trade on Wall Street is the size of the American population,”
He said that more than 200,000 people use the Sandbox every month. Siu says that the number of jobs created on the platform and how much money the game brings in are better ways to measure how engaged users are with the platform.
“Every landowner in Sandbox has a wallet that’s between half a million and $2 million,” he said.
Siu also talked about the Animoca-backed virtual game Axie Infinity. The blockchain-based platform, which was made by game developer Sky Mavis and lets players breed and fight monsters represented by NFTs, was hacked for $620 million in March. Since then, the price of the crypto tokens used in the game and the number of its users have both plummeted as the market for digital assets has fallen. People have also said bad things about how the game makes players feel.
Siu says that many gaming companies are probably jealous of Axie Infinity’s position, especially since it has a billion-dollar reserve. Still, he said that Axie Infinity was like Angry Birds, which is a Finnish mobile game that became very popular in the early 2010s. Even though Axie Infinity shows how blockchain gaming could be used, in the same way that Angry Birds showed how mobile gaming could be used, he doesn’t think it’s the future of blockchain gaming.
Siu said that the crypto winter has had less of an effect on blockchain games than on the rest of the cryptocurrency industry. Siu said that Animoca’s recent $110 million fundraise, in which Temasek Holdings Pte., Boyu Capital, and GGV Capital all took part, was a flat round, while other crypto companies are looking for funding rounds at lower valuations. He also talked about the possibility of new rules coming out of Hong Kong that could be good for the industry.
He said that at the upcoming Hong Kong Fintech Week, he is expected to help explain the policy. He said, “I think in a week or two, they’re going to come out with a sweeping cryptocurrency and digital assets policy that’s supposed to be very progressive.”
“Presumably, they wouldn’t ask me to go on stage if it was going to be bad news, so I’m optimistic,”he said.
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