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Sébastien Borget Of Sandbox - The Gaming Metaverse Taking Over The NFT World, Plus Gen Z NFT Holiday Gifts, General Catalyst Invest $7M In Jadu, And More...
NFTs are truly one of the greatest inventions of our futuristic world today, and now they pushes the gaming metaverse beyond its limits. Join Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger as they talk with Sébastien Borget of Sandbox. He shares how he turns this million-dollar investment into a platform for producing a wide variety of ideas and celebrating content creators and developers. Sébastien explains how Sandbox changes the virtual land ownership game and what makes it an enticing investment, for ambitious up-and-coming degens and established celebrities alike. For their hot topics, the group discusses how Gen Z favors NFTs for holiday gifts and how one start-up company invested millions in developing NFT jetpacks.
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Sébastien Borget Of Sandbox – The Gaming Metaverse Taking Over The NFT World, Plus Gen Z NFT Holiday Gifts, General Catalyst Invest $7M In Jadu, And More…
All you NFT curious readers, check out this episode to learn how the Sandbox is turning a $93 million investment into a playground for the creative class of the future, how our guest used his childhood interest in programming to get a jumpstart on his career.
Also, find out which world-class hip hop legend is amped about the Sandbox and is part of a cool giveaway for our show. All this and more. Stay tuned.
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This episode features Sebastien Borget, Cofounder and COO of The Sandbox, a unique virtual world where players can build, own and monetize their gaming experiences using Sand, the main utility token of the platform. Besides helping to realize the Sandbox vision, he is an active speaker and evangelist on the opportunity NFTs bring to gaming. He also becomes the President of the Blockchain Game Alliance in 2020, a nonprofit organization of 170 key members of the industry and was named in the top 100 most influential people in crypto by Cointelegraph. Sebastien, welcome to the show.
Thank you for the introduction.
I don’t think there’s a day in the last few months, Sebastien, that Sandbox does not come up in conversation between us and someone. For those that are familiar with all the amazing that you’re doing, it would be great if you could kick off with how this idea and team came about. Let’s hear your genesis story.
The Sandbox story is a long one. It started several years ago originally as a mobile game on iOS and Android. We decided that we wanted to use new technology back then with smartphones and touchscreens to enable anyone to become a creator or player to become creators. By the touch of their finger to share any pixelated world, playing over with physical elements, some like a Mario maker, and then sharing those creations online where older could play it.
It became a large success quickly with more than 40 million installed, 70 million player-made creations, and users were spending hours or days to create amazing content. Yet, that content contributed to bringing more downloads, players and revenue, and led to our company being acquired in 2018 by any cabaret. Yet we had no way to reward those creators for the contribution they brought in and making it a success.
There was this frustration that we had after being so successful with UGC and at the same time, not being able to reward creators fairly, giving them back for the value of the app. I was back then still playing with technology and discovering blockchain Bitcoin. At the end of 2017, for the first time, there’s a game that used blockchain. Let’s try it out.
I bought my first CryptoKitties by then, and immediately I saw the potential of combining that technology, the NFT, that allowed those virtual cats to be stored in a wallet that can be transferred to any user and solo marketplace, back then OpenSea. Instead of having developers and professional companies that make that, let’s open it to everyone. Let’s combine user-generated content and NFTs to empower creators to let them own and monetize their creations. We started to work from the ground up on a new version of Sandbox, 3D platform using NFTs and Sand token at the center, giving back value to those players and creators. That essentially is the genesis of building with decentralized web free gaming virtual world that you see now as Sandbox.
This is a great vision. We’re all getting excited about this idea of rewarding creators. We see the growth of the creator economy being a huge part of the future as robots take our normal jobs and such. It’s refreshing to hear that. Not everybody is going to be frustrated that creators aren’t getting rewarded.
There are other businesses out there we don’t have to mention that don’t necessarily care how much the creators get rewarded. This is beautiful. Can you dive a little bit deeper into the experience that people have with the Sand token and how people end up getting rewarded through engaging with the Sandbox?
The Sandbox is like this platform with multiple tools, creation tools, marketplace, and map. It looks at it for the 3D Editor, a GameMaker, which is no code for making games. Even the player side now, Wizard Alpha, that we launch around the end of November 2021. We touched down with many different audiences and communities.
What that means is that it’s shaping to become that open metaverse that allows all sorts of audiences to interact with them and to earn. I’m talking about new digital jobs, new revenue stream for people who contribute either as a player or as creator into Sandbox. We’re touching both the creator economy and the play-to-earn. We have already hundreds of artists making 3D assets that are like game items, animated that can be used with the no-code GameMaker.
We have dozens of metaverse architect deals, virtual fashion designers, game designers, development designers and many more, community managers, host, virtual show designers, people who are essentially creating all the content that’s going to populate the land and experiences. I do believe like 99% of the metaverse will be user-made. It’s important to empower and provide them with the tools to do so.
Those are opportunities that are offering real revenue. We’re talking revenue that goes beyond the minimum wage in many countries, not just third-world countries, but like talking about the US, Canada, France, Japan, Korea, Taiwan. Those creators who, some of them and I talk with them quite often, they move from being a single individual discovering Sandbox and building for themselves, sharing over social media, becoming popular now as they became studios of hiring 10, 20, 40, the largest one is 80 people.
Those are all large companies, businesses now that can become profitable by servicing and creating an experience for all our 17,000 landowners, IT brands and more. It’s also enabling players now to earn, since we introduced Alpha. There have been 5,000 Alpha Pass distributed either to landowner or to users who came in and engaged with 1 of the 4 public.
Users participate in eighteen experience that gets released and unveil progressively until December 20, 2021. If they complete the nine simple quests, basically taking 5, 20 or 30 minutes a day, they will be able to claim a thousand Sand and free exclusive NFT. Effectively, we’re creating engagement and fun. We’re showcasing some of the possibilities of what it is completely the metaverse for any user. We are wanting engagement and those rewards in the form of NFTs and Sand tokens.
To give you a rough idea of 1,000 Sand tokens, it is about $5,000. For many countries, it’s more than one month’s salary, sometimes your salary depends. It’s a great example of what will happen once 166, 464 lands will be opening, and anyone can launch its own play-to-earn season in Sandbox. There will be a huge scale of network effects and there will be a great diversity for anyone entering, which is an avatar to choose from how they want to have fun, how they want to spend time, how they want to potentially earn revenue from those activities and older experiences.
**It’s so exciting. As a landowner, let’s view it from that perspective for a moment. How are those opportunities going to evolve here over time? It seems like there is some real potential there. **
That’s a great transition because that’s the last opportunity I didn’t talk about, like lands are becoming infrastructure. People understand well the concept of virtual real estate around the world. Land in Sandbox has become one of the highest ranked NFT collections over OpenSea. Over several days, we’ve generated more than $85 million GMV. Over a lifetime, more than $300 million of GMV. It’s easy to understand essentially owning the land. You can either rent it to someone else or you can use it, build an experience and through that, access monetization. Why it’s so exciting and potentially a great revenue generator is because, like building into the metaverse or the virtual world, it’s so much easier and faster than building in the real world. We’re talking about hours, days, maybe weeks at worst, create concerns in the metaverse.
You’re touching a global audience. We have ITs from Korea, US and Europe, meaning we have users from all around the world that can come and discover your land. Whereas in the physical world, location matters, but you have to choose a town or a country. You’re limited on your invite, and it takes not just days, hours or weeks. It takes months, if not years, to start operating something.
Gaming Metaverse: Sandbox is open to everyone, combining user-generated content and NFTs to empower creators.
With this magnitude acceleration of time plus also not being bounded by any physical load limitation, like the only limit becomes your imagination. You want to create a light effect. You want to have a flying creator. You want to make floating islands or also all the cool stuff that come out of somebody’s imagination. You can do that in the metaverse. That makes it also fun and entertaining. The people want to discover those kinds of things.
I’ve always wanted my own blimp. I’m going to have to figure that out. This is the Web3 economy. This is the convergence that we’ve all been talking about. It’s amazing to hear what you’re doing. You’re literally changing the world. You’re co-creating the future and you’re inviting everyone to the table. I’m so excited about the journey that is ahead for Sandbox. You transitioned from your early testing to the Alpha launch. We’re excited to learn about what these adventures are going to be like and what this experience is going to be. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Everyone now is wondering what the metaverse is since Facebook started to rebrand itself as Meta. Almost every day, everywhere, people talk about that. To simplify it, I would describe it as a place, a digital universe or virtual world where we’re all going to be more socially connected and live a more immersive experience.
It’s some kind that we cannot do into the physical world and we’re going to do that not necessarily through VR or complex interface, but 3D characters that represent ourselves, our new digital identity with the virtual world. We hope that we were building these open metaverse where users are self-sovereign. They own their identify, currency, and digital asset in the form of NFTs. They can transfer their assets from one place to another. They can reuse it from one virtual world to another. They can engage in things that are more than games or socializing. These are very little examples of what’s possible in the metaverse. They are going to see virtual shows, concert, art galleries, museum and games. Games are essential, but it’s not the only thing you’re going to see, and that’s the great variety of experiences that makes the metaverse exciting for many.
It seems like the sky is the limit. Everything is accelerating so quickly in terms of development and how these worlds are forming over time. We know it takes resources though to do that. We have time and knowledge, but also money to help bring in talent and continue to work and explore these things. We know you raised $93 million. Congratulations. It’s a big chunk of change. How does that impact your roadmap, and what should we expect from here?
On November 2nd, 2021, we announced raising our Series B round led by Softbank Vision Fund too, as well as Liberty City Venture, Get Axed Interactive, Animal Care Brands, Samsung Next, LG Tech Venture and a few other strategic investors. First of all, it’s a great endorsement validation of strategic funds. I’ve been supporting some of the most innovative companies in the world and shaping technology, internet and the way we’re using and interacting with technology for the past many years, endorsing the idea that we need to build a Web3 decentralized metaverse, not keep supporting those Web2 platforms.
With these funds, we’re going to be able to hire more to keep building our platform, improving our tools and let the creators boost the limits of their imagination and feel more experienced. We’re going to be able to bring more ITs and brands. Metaverse is going to be a place which should be fun, should be almost like non-stop entertainment because you have a great variety of artists, virtual shows or concerts, and celebrities and things that bring you closer to your favorite brand. After the less fun things, a server calls to sit there up and then abusively continue to evangelize and through marketing action bring more users towards Web3, NFTs and metaverse.
It’s exciting, all of that stuff coming together. Some of the less sexy stuff that you mentioned, servers and infrastructure, that’s required to make this thing go in. A lot of people don’t realize everything that goes into the back end of this thing, of projects of companies such as yours and others. We don’t talk about a lot in it because it’s not as sexy as talking about Josh’s blimp that he’s going to be getting. It’s so important. It’s good to elevate that because it costs money and requires talent, effort, knowledge and resources that the public eye doesn’t necessarily see very frequently.
**Going back to that theme of creator economy, part of why we get so amped about tech and blockchain in general is because when you’re investing in this domain, you’re investing in creating the future. What is the future going to be like? What is the metaverse going to be like? What is a platform that allows creators to be creators look like? That’s exciting too that that’s where these funds get applied, and that as a society and that there are so many enthusiastic investors out there to help participate in this. You’ve also partnered with some influencers and very special folks out there. This first one, I’m not familiar, Snoop Dogg, but anyway, you’ve got Hell’s Kitchen, The Walking Dead, Smurfs. It runs the gamut. Adidas is one of your major partners. How has all of this brought forth a new wave of business opportunities? Can you expand upon that a little bit? **
Like almost everything, it started pretty slow. It used to take us almost a year to convince the first brand to enter and believe the vision of true ownership and let the community of NFTs and use that as a medium to bring them closer. The one thing that Sandbox does very well is all the NFTs in Sandbox have. You can build your own game experience that combines all those NFTs from your favorite brand, and you can publish it online and monetize it. We have exciting features that are accessible by anyone and starting to launch our own NFT ticket to restrict potentially access only to the owner of that land and make it more a space for the holders of it. As a community, that’s also very interesting.
Now, the situation is very different. As you said, we have The Walking Dead, Snoop Dogg, Adidas announced entering Sandbox. Steve Aoki was announced, and then we have family-friendly entertainment, Care Bears, Smurf. It’s going to keep accelerating like this and probably snowball by network effects. More brands and celebrities, they will feel like it will be harder for them not to have a presence in the metaverse. Not to be able to engage with the community in a more meaningful manner. It’s something that true fans will bring value to the true collectors or they will be delivering. In a way, like what we are seeing with Bored Ape for example, it’s turning into this special social statute with access to both online and physical world events. They’re doing a great job here at leveraging this community aspect.
We are helping those brands to think and define themselves, like what does that mean we’re entering a metaverse? Is it about user-generated content? Is it about making sure that the next generation and after they will keep enjoying our brands and in a new manner like having gamified item, equipment, new powers?
It’s great to have that balance between user-generated content on one side, a lot of creativity, and brands on the other side. Not just brands, and make it purely commercial. We don’t want the metaverse to become a Times Square full of billboards. We want it to be like a place where culture will express itself in so many different ways. That’s not just focused on commerce and transaction, but more focused on community value and social relationships between humans.
I’m excited that you mentioned the Care Bears there. I was not aware of that. I’m imagining you’ve got somebody being me in the metaverse, and you could have a literal Care Bear stare.
Unfortunately, I have to step away from this very engaging conversation to co-create the future of Edge of NFT in another call, but I’ve got to ask, we were there at Art Basel. Let’s call it NFT Basel because that’s what it was. You announced the big partnership with Snoop. Give our readers a little glimpse into that relationship. What was it like to talk to Snoop about his involvement in the Sandbox and what was that launch experience like? You don’t have to get into exact specifics on what may or may not have been inhaled by at least one of the parties in the room. What was it like working with Snoop, and what is he excited about when it comes to collaborating?
Gaming Metaverse: Building in the virtual world is easier and faster than building in the real world. It would only take around a few hours or weeks at most to create content.
It’s very exciting. What Snoop represents for many people is like he’s this hip-hop legend. He’s global. He’s known. He’s representing success for many people, and he keeps pushing and reinventing himself. If you look at the top celebrity, who is the most present and involved into NFTs, owning NTFs himself, launching new experience.
AR skateboard. We have the first concert into the metaverse. He’s at our top collection coming up in Sandbox. He and his team have been doing a fantastic job. He was not the first, but he’s catching up, and now I believe, based on a top runner report, he’s the one who own the largest connection and more. He gets it. He’s always thinking like, “How do I create something new and engaging for my fan?”
The one thing that came up when we brainstormed what we can do is to bring his mansion. Make it accessible to anyone or make his first concert accessible to the pass holders and create maybe easy early access pass, which if you hone it, you will receive new drops, access to different kinds of perks. He gets community and he’s reeling to boost the way people will see him. That is great because it’s inspiring more people. That was before and after Snoop entered NFTs in general. Everyone who saw his first teaser was saying, “That’s cool the way he did it in Sandbox.” People could project that.
**How young were you when you started coding? **
Around thirteen by then.
The best to the best can move on.
I don’t have an answer.
Did you want to do another hot topic, Jeff?
Let’s do the next one.
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About Sébastien Borget
Entrepreneur & Dad with 12 years experience in growing startups. 2 years in Blockchain and 8 years in Mobile Gaming. Worked for numerous startups with diverse business models.
Sébastien manages the operations of Pixowl’s 45 people international team. Together, we are building a Family Mobile Network of social mobile games based on popular Characters IP.
Currently working on the production of the following titles for iOS & Android: The Sandbox, The Sandbox 2, Garfield: Survival of the Fattest, Peanuts and one more secret cartoon IP game!
He has supervised the production and marketing of the studio’s most popular titles: Doodle Grub and The Sandbox (40+ million players in total). His work was awarded by the nomination for 2 consecutive years of The Sandbox in App Store Best Games of 2012 and 2013!
Sebastien holds a Computer Science Engineer Degree from Telecom SudParis, one of France’s leading graduate school of engineering in Information and Communication Technology.
Prior to co-founding Pixowl, I worked from 2007 — 2011 as Chief Operations Officer at Wixi. Before Wixi, I was employed as a Web Project Manager at Ipercast executing projects for customers such as Universal Music, AB Video, and FilmoTV.