Why it could be a life changing decision and guidance on how to buy your first own virtual land
The metaverse is currently on everyone’s mind. The trend was fueled when Facebook renamed itself Meta. The market for metaverses is growing rapidly, with new players emerging every week. In this series of articles, we will look at the biggest metaverses, especially with regard to their potential in the real estate sector. Despite the current dip in cryptocurrency prices, these metaverses require a significant amount of money to be able to afford a property. Nevertheless, it is important to look at the biggest players in order to be able to snap up good opportunities and identify similar patterns in new entrants (this series of articles follows). Moreover, recent developments show that despite the high sums, popular metaverses are indispensable for brands (Brands from Adidas, Ferrari to Nike rush towards the metaverse).
This week we will start the series of articles with The Sandbox and its native token SAND.
What is The Sandbox?
The Sandbox is a blockchain-powered virtual world. It consists of lands, and voxels fill up each of those lands. Visually, it will remind many gamers of Minecraft given its Lego-like look.
Furthermore, players can buy virtual lands that can be used for minigames, adventures, virtual shops, extensions of actual webshops, social gathering spaces, and so forth. The Sandbox provides free tools to developers, gamers, and content creators, including VoxEdit, which lets creators make objects, and the Game Maker, which allows them to create interactive virtual worlds. The Sandbox will also create a meta game experience. For example, players can do daily tasks or weekly tasks for their guild. This will earn players SAND, which they can sell or use to buy in-game items or virtual land.
Sandbox has been getting the most media attention lately and is probably the most popular metaverse currently. It has announced a variety of partnerships in recent weeks, from OpenSea to Snoop Dogg and The Walking Dead. It also recently closed a $93 million funding round. Lets have a deeper look into the real estate side of The Sandbox.
What is the purpose of buying a piece of land in the Sandbox?
Virtual properties in Sandbox are called LAND and are NFTS mapped on the Ethereum Blockchain. LAND can be purchased with the native game token SAND. The main purpose of LAND is to allow game designers and developers to publish experiences to them, and players can play these experiences and monetize them themselves. But other utilities will be available, such as the ability to lease LAND and mortgage LAND. LAND can also be combined into a larger ESTATE or DISTRICT, as long as they are adjacent. Or, you can split ESTATE into smaller LANDs. There are two types of LAND – regular and premium. Compared with regular LAND, premium LAND has more advantages:
- Premium LANDs are surrounding major partners or social hubs. This means that the LANDs surrounding that area will experience higher traffic from players, due to players joining the metaverse through these social hubs via portals and then branching outwards to explore the nearby LANDs.
- More traffic means more potential monetisation income through pay-to-play games or renting the LAND out to other developers.
- Another benefit of having more traffic is that more players will see any advertisements that have been placed on billboards on premium LANDs. Potentially netting the premium LAND owner a small trickle of income from renting out billboard space on their LANDs to others or directing visitors to their own online store, and so forth.
- There is also potentially less need for premium LAND owners to have to market their experiences on social media, compared to someone who built an experience on a regular LAND.
- When premium LANDs are initially sold in sales, they will come with exclusive, limited-time ASSETs. Over time, these ASSETs will become highly desirable by collectors and game designers as they get rarer.
How can brands and investors become wealthy with Sandbox LAND?
Owning digital real estate or LAND in Sandbox offers multiple opportunities to build stable sources of income. Let’s look at what possibilities exist:
Renting your LAND
One of the main ways to earn money with LAND in Sandbox is to rent out your own land. The interested parties can be private individuals, but mainly companies that would like to hold virtual conferences or events there, but cannot afford land or only want to rent it.
Hosting experiences on your LAND
One of the main functions of Sandbox is to create and host experiences such as games, exhibitions, classes and many more. In fact, almost any real life event can also be virtually mapped in the Metaverse. For creating these experiences the Sandbox tool Game Maker can be used. When landowners in Sandbox create these events, they can charge an entrance fee as a source of revenue, for example, or seek sponsors to advertise at the event. You can either create and market the events by yourself or use a service like the one from Meta Builders. There is a lot here that has not yet been fully discovered and still offers many exciting possibilities for creative minds.
Buying & reselling LAND
Of course, money can also be made by buying LAND cheaper and then reselling it at a profit. This requires a good overview of the real estate market to resell the land at a suitable time. Until that time comes, the above methods can be used to generate income. Feel free to use our contact form and we will take care of finding you suitable real estate properties in popular metaverses like the Sandbox, Decentraland and Axie Infinity.
Staking
Last but not least, Staking. This will be an feature which will be added in the future, which allows land owners to stake cryptocurrency on their lands in exchange for passive bonuses. These bonuses can then be sold on the markeplace, which provides another income stream for landowners.
How can Sandbox LAND be bought?
Sandbox LAND can be purchased in two different ways. Sandbox holds public LAND sales at regular intervals, which are announced in their official communities in advance (or by simply following me on twitter). Here, land is sold at a fixed price. To get a feel for the price in these public LAND sales, we have the following figures for you. The Sandbox has always maintained the pricing of its land: 1011 SAND for a regular parcel and 4683 for a premium one. However, SAND has never been worth more than $1 during a land sale, and now it’s more than $5. The problem: In the meanwhile real estate in Sandbox has become very popular. As a result, public sales have also attracted a lot of interest from players and investors. Often LAND is sold out within seconds during the few public LAND sales.
That is why many buyers switch to the second way to buy at LAND on the secondary market, OpenSea.io. OpenSea is a secondary, third-party marketplace where you can purchase many NFTs, including The Sandbox LANDs. You would need to register for an account at OpenSea to purchase the LANDS from there. And you would also need to register an account at The Sandbox to use the LANDs on the platform. LAND can be purchased in SAND or ETH on OpenSea, which is dependent on the choice of the seller. Here you can find LAND on opensea.io. The problem here is that the prices here are regularly much higher than at public LAND sales. But you can filter by price and choose exactly the land you want to have. A in depth-guide to buy LAND on OpenSea can be found here.
Valuing the price of LAND on the secondary market
It is very complex to determine the value of LAND in Sandbox. One thing about the blockchain that you may have noticed is that values of NFTs and coins tend to fluctuate. Furthermore, the development within the game should always be observed. Will new functions be added? How is the number of users developing? Is the value of the in-game currency increasing or decreasing? This sounds like a lot of factors to consider (and it is), but the more factors that are taken into account, the more accurate the analysis will be.This fluctuation is based on many factors. It’s understandable that this makes valuing things a bit confusing.
On top of that, the value of LANDs in The Sandbox are also affected by other factors, such as the proximity of that LAND to major partner ESTATEs. For example, a premium LAND that is touching a large ESTATE that belongs to a major partner may generally be valued much higher than a premium LAND not touching the ESTATE or a regular LAND further away from it.
Why? Because players will spawn into the metaverse via portals that are found on these partner ESTATEs. These players will then branch outwards and visit the nearby LANDs, of which premium LANDs are the nearest. There is a useful third-party tool that will help you to gauge the value of your LAND. You can find it by clicking here. This tool is provided by MetaGameHub DAO.
Is Sandbox LAND a good Investment – Final thoughts
Sandbox has attracted attention with record sums for land. Meanwhile, it is very difficult to get real estate in Public LAND Sales. The route via OpenSea is also not ideal, as astronomical sums are sometimes demanded for LAND here. However, the current dip in cryptocurrencies could be an interesting opportunity for informed and interested buyers to purchase their first LAND. It is possible that we are just at the beginning of the development and that the value of virtual land in Sandbox will continue to fall. However, it could also decrease in value just as quickly. The location of the land and other factors should always be taken into account. You are welcome to follow us on Twitter for the latest analysis and news so you don’t miss any more opportunities.
If you have any queries about buying land in the Metaverse, feel free to ask in the comment section or use our contact form for business inquires.
