As more people explore their digital lives, there will be an ever increasing need for developers and creative artists to construct worlds in which such “living” takes place. The Sandbox is one of several metaverses eager to partner with designers and companies to help build the future of 3-D virtual spaces that enable participants to move around with their avatars, meet people, play games and live their digital lives.

While some research puts expected metaverse growth at over $50 million this year industry wide—with upwards of 44 percent annual gains—concerns remain on the effects of the current bear market and how it impacts enthusiasm for metaverse spending. Recently, Decentraland’s second annual Metaverse Fashion Week saw its numbers drop—drawing only 26,000 unique visitors compared to last year’s 100,000, according to MarketWatch. Meanwhile, Voxel recently announced new VR experiences to its users, signaling its commitment to growing the ecosystem and providing players with new ways to interact. 

As previously reported by Decential this fall, The Sandbox made a strong push to have South East Asian web3 gaming studios take part in its hundred-million dollar development fund to help grow its web3 gaming ecosystem. The company hasn’t slowed in its mission to partner with a variety of outside companies and brands to help them build what they want to build by providing the space and tools to do so. While the mission remains the same there’s been an added focus moving forward: Digital ownership.

“For us, the web3 component is very important because it’s all about ownership of your digital life,” Mathieu Nouzareth, the company’s U.S. chief executive officer said in an interview. “Right now, if you go into Fortnite or Roblox, you don’t own anything as a user or a creator. But if you go to The Sandbox, you can truly own your digital assets.”

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While other metaverse ecosystems exist, not all of them cater to digital ownership, despite them being digital realms. “People don’t realize they’re actually renting what they pay for [on other platforms],” Nouzareth continued. “With The Sandbox, you can really truly own everything you do, and we believe if we have to spend more time in the metaverse, owning and having digital property is very important for users and creators.”

Nouzareth looks to the real world as an example of how land ownership serves as a benchmark for successful economies, and believes the metaverse will be no different. 

“I’m not an economist, but if you look at all of the developed countries around the world, there is a very strong correlation between a country that is highly developed and the fact that you can have property rights,” he said. “It’s safe and you have a rule of law. The less safe your property rights, the less developed the country is, and I think it’s going to be the same in the digital world. Platforms where you have digital property rights will do better than platforms that own and control everything.”

Ownership is also key to encouraging user-generated content. 

“We believe in a multi-metaverse world, we believe in being interoperable between different web3 metaverses, and we believe in digital ownership of what you create and what you buy,” Nouzareth said. “Let’s say you ‘own’ a skin in Fortnite. You don’t really own the skin—yes, you can buy it, but at any time, the company can take it away. They can do whatever they want. The creators have less freedom and can express themselves less because it’s more controlled by the company. From a purely financial perspective, Roblox takes maybe 70 percent or 80 percent of the proceeds, whereas we at The Sandbox only get 5 percent commission—we give 95 percent back to the creators, so it’s much more interesting for them to work inside here.”

Ownership within The Sandbox also creates a secondary market for creators to profit from and empowers them to be in control of the future of their assets. “Something very important is if you own your digital properties, you can resell them and you can modify them,” Nouzareth said. “In the real world, imagine if you had a car and you couldn’t change the color or the tires. Imagine if everything was decided by the car maker. In the real world, you can buy your car, and once you have your car, you can pretty much do what you want with it. That’s also the promise of web3—you buy a digital good and if you want to change it, tweak it, resell it, or combine it with something else—you can.”

It’s why The Sandbox wants to partner with brands and companies that want to create cool stuff and own what they create.

“We have several ways to activate partners,” Nouzareth said. “The easiest one is to sell land. We are a land-based metaverse with a finite amount of land—166,000 plots of land maximum forever—and every plot is about 2.5 acres. So all together, The Sandbox is about the size of Los Angeles if you are an avatar roaming around.”

He continued, “We can also activate partners by doing NFT connections so we can drop an avatar and sell virtual items. The last way to activate a partener is to build a full-fledged experience where the partners buy land and can build anything from a game to a concert to a social experience to a store.”

The Sandbox is also looking at partnerships to uncover the value between the digital and real world.

“You can decide to have everything inside The Sandbox as a digital experience, but we’re also working on the bridge between the digital and the physical,” Nouzareth said. “For example, for products, you can have digital twins where you buy a physical handbag that comes with a QR code and then receive the digital equivalent of the handbag inside The Sandbox. Or, you can buy sneakers inside The Sandbox, and when you go to a physical store, you can redeem a physical pair of shoes or something else. For music, you can purchase a ticket to a virtual concert and the digital ticket could be used as a ‘backstage pass’ at a physical concert. It can go both ways.”

Two years ago, The Sandbox sold tickets to a Snoop Dogg virtual concert that included more than just access to the show, Nouzareth said. “It will provide more perks eventually,” he said, and teased that we’ll be seeing more activations in coming weeks and months. “The virtual ticket can almost become a fan club membership,” he said. “For brands, it can become a loyalty card—proof that you purchased an NFT from them—which will in turn give you special perks in the real world.”

But we may be years away from seeing a fully enmeshed digital and physical world. “The shift won’t be massive, things will happen step by step,” Nouzareth said. “With The Sandbox, we’re just providing the platform. We’re building some experiences ourselves, but most of the time, we really want to partner with brands and companies to build what they have in mind. It’s really up to the brands, artists, companies and entrepreneurs to come up with ideas, and the platform is flexible enough so that they can do what they want. We can’t wait to see what's built.”