Empowering Creators: The Sandbox's Role in Web3 & Blockchain Gaming

Welcome to a special edition of The Edge of Show, formerly known as Edge of NFT. Live from The Sandbox US Office in Los Angeles, this episode explores Sandbox Awards 2024 and the rising momentum of the Sandbox Metaverse. Hosted by Josh Kriger, the spotlight shines on Sebastien Borget, Co-Founder and COO of The Sandbox, as he dives deep into the platform’s explosive growth, success of Alpha Season 4, and how Sandbox Metaverse is empowering creators and redefining the Web3 gaming landscape.

From onboarding over 500,000 players and featuring 40+ global brand partners, to selling 300,000+ NFTs and igniting over 1 million blockchain transactions, Sandbox Metaverse is proving the critics wrong—Web3 gaming is thriving. Borget discusses regional expansions, strategic partnerships, creator empowerment, and the path ahead for Sandbox Metaverse beyond just financial incentives. Whether you're a brand, gamer, or indie creator, this episode unpacks how the Sandbox Metaverse is fueling a decentralized creative revolution.

Key Topics Covered:

• Alpha Season 4’s Record-Breaking Performance:
  Over half a million players explored 100+ experiences, powered by 40 top brand partners like Attack on Titan, Terminator, Playboy, and more—proving the Sandbox Metaverse is alive and thriving.
  
  
• Massive NFT and Blockchain Activity:
  With 300K+ NFTs sold and over 1M blockchain transactions, Sandbox Awards 2024 showcases the explosive growth of Web3 gaming and digital asset engagement.
  
  
• Strategic Global Expansion:
  Sebastien Borget highlights Sandbox’s shift to Asia and MENA regions, now comprising 40% of user base, with active presence in Saudi Arabia, Korea, Thailand, and beyond.
  
  
• Independent Creator Empowerment:
  Despite large brand integrations, Sandbox remains UGC-focused, supporting creators through game jams, builder challenges, and the new GameMaker 0.10 and 0.11 updates.
  
  
• Future Vision Beyond the Platform:
  Sandbox expands its ecosystem via the Voxel Games Program, introducing voxel-based games beyond Sandbox’s core platform, utilizing the SAND token as the bridge between Web2 and Web3.
  
  

Episode Highlights:

“We’ve sold over 300,000 NFTs and generated 1 million blockchain transactions—just in this season.” — Sebastien Borget

“Sandbox isn’t just surviving—it’s thriving. We’re breaking records with 500K players and 40 brand partners.” — Sebastien Borget

“We’ve stayed true to our mission: empowering creators through accessible tools and decentralization.” — Sebastien Borget

“Asia now represents 40% of our partners and landowners. The focus shift was strategic and essential.” — Sebastien Borget

“Without fun gameplay, financial incentives won’t matter. That’s why we invest deeply in game design.” — Sebastien Borget

People and Resources Mentioned:

• Sebastien Borget
• Josh Kriger
• The Sandbox
• Attack on Titan
• Terminator
• Playboy
• Love Island
• Kira Bear
• Jamiroquai
• Chupa Chups
• Hell’s Kitchen
• Voxel Games Program

About Our Guest:

Sebastien Borget is the Co-Founder and COO of The Sandbox, a leading Web3 gaming and metaverse platform. Under his leadership, The Sandbox has evolved into a decentralized ecosystem empowering creators and brands through NFTs and blockchain technology. Sebastien is a pioneer in the blockchain gaming industry, driving global adoption through partnerships with major franchises, launching successful creator-driven events like Alpha Seasons, and expanding Sandbox’s footprint across Asia, MENA, and beyond. His work continues to shape the future of Web3 gaming and metaverse innovation.

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Transcripts:

Josh Kriger: Hello, I'm Josh Kriger. Welcome to a special edition of the Edge of Show. Formerly Edge of NFT, we are live from the Sandbox US office in Los Angeles as the Sandbox Awards 2024 event. Today we're exploring the heart of the metaverse with none other than Sebastien Borget, the co-founder and COO of the Sandbox. From empowering creators to redefining gaming and beyond, Sebastian has been at the forefront of Web3 innovation, leading one of the most influential platforms in this space. Stay tuned as we explore the future of the metaverse, the results of Alpha Season 4, and what's next for Sandbox in the blockchain gaming world. Let's hear it for Sebastian. Thanks for joining. So things do feel a little bit warmer. I was checking the charts yesterday, and I think sand is up 300% this month. That was fun to learn, not financial advice, obviously. But I think it bangs the question that everyone asked you a million times during the depths of the beer market, which is sort of, where is this metaverse going? You know, it's been called everything, right, from the future to the graveyard. What's your take on the current state of the Metaverse?

Sebastien Borget: Well, I think we're all here to prove that it's far from dead. It's pretty active, actually. I'm really excited. We've been literally breaking records recently. You mentioned CFA Season 4. That's been the largest event that we've worked on. We launched it 10 weeks ago. We're literally in Week 10 right now. And we got like more than half a million players engaging through it, playing Navigator for two hours time, exploring close to a hundred experiences live. Those a hundred experiences featuring like 40 major brands partners. So not only like we are audiences in the metaverse, we are like top brands, top partners, like Attack on Titan, Terminator, we have like Playboy, Love Island, Kira Bear, Jamiroquai. Health Kitchen, Chupa Chups, many, many, many. So like a lot, great showcase of content from the US and global. And we also had like an amazing conversion of that audience. They are not just here to play, to earn, but they also like have been engaging with free purchasing all the different digital assets that we have available. So we sold more than 300,000 NFTs. We generated 1 million blockchain transactions. And to add to that, is it just this season? Yeah, just this season. Some of the avatar connections sold out. All of them? Like in Graveyard? No, and that's just like the tip of the iceberg of what's been happening at Sandbox this year. Besides the alpha season 4, we've continued to do what we've been doing quite consistently before, like lamb sales, avatar sales, bringing brands, top partners, to have this footprint through a land into a neighborhood on a map and allowing their fans to become the neighbors of those. We did the net sale with Attack of Titan, it totally sold out. We have Kikom land sale, and it's close to sold out. I think there's literally 10 lands left. So if you really want to be like Kingsong, School of Ireland, like neighbor, you got to grab that quickly. All the Avakar sales we've introduced, so there's more than close to 25 ready collaborations we've done. Also, like, resold well. And it did, of course, just sell in like 10 minutes, like at the peak of the market. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that we keep on boarding users to explore the content. And that's all from the brand side and from the creator side as well. Because I believe Maersk is massively going to be usually seed-driven. We celebrated 1,500 games published and live on our map in one year. We just held the award. So if you didn't watch it live earlier today, the award was a ceremony that celebrated the top creators and all the diversity of content and gameplay from Oracle system. And there was a great moment for people to see what's happening.

Josh Kriger: Let's give a congrats for all of that. That's amazing.

Sebastien Borget: So, and that was just Sandbox. So the other thing I got was watching the news like the Metaverse in general is something that we're very focused to build at Sandbox with Web3, but there's other actors in the ecosystem thinking about Epic, thinking about like Roblox, even Meta, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. They haven't stopped building anything around the manoeuvres, so there's a lot of force at play. I think it's going to take quite naturally a longer time to actually achieve the overall vision and adoption, and maybe expectations from the market or the media were a bit too optimistic back in 2021.

Josh Kriger: There's a lot of interesting facts that you shared, but what stood out for me is you said 40 brands were actively part of this season. And, you know, I think I always anticipated the brands needed to come to make Web3 truly fertile and give it longevity. So it's great to see those brands are still in the game. Are there any anecdotes from like leaders of brands that you talked to about their experience working with you or like just fun stories you have about any of the collaborations this season?

Sebastien Borget: Like the one thing that's, you know, like brands of like those huge audiences, they have like all those fans and sometimes they always wonder like how we're interested by Wave 3, we're interested by this new technology, but we're not familiar like how we could get E2 with Cocuit and Sidebox is a fantastic platform for them to onboard because they don't have all the complexity of understanding tokens and tokenomics. They don't have all the complexity around building writing code and smart contracts and all the security aspects. We just make it simple for them to offer a way to engage and reward their fans through NFTs, through some tokens. and to also even benefit from the creativity of our community. So basically, we match brands and creators together. That's a strong value proposition. And they also are surprised that bringing many brands together, like we're doing, instead of just one at a time, is actually creating a very positive cumulative effect. So fans of Attack of Titan came, fans of Hellbound, fans of Terminator, but they didn't stay just for one birth. Because just like in the real world, we're not just for one fate. they are staying to explore through the season. The layouts give a meta gameplay that allows the player or fan from one brand to stay and like explore more content, growing the audience. So there is this really nice network effect happening as well. In terms of like anecdotes or fun story building,

Josh Kriger: Some of the things that happened working with some of these brands or maybe a text you got from one of the executives when they sold out their land or something.

Sebastien Borget: Well, you got me here. The one thing is I have an amazing team that's directly working with the brand, so I'm not in contact directly myself with the brand. All I get is if something is really going wrong, they get to me. And the good thing is nobody got back to me, so apparently, meaning that everything went well.

Josh Kriger: I think that says a lot about how much Sandbox is growing. And I know this office is one of many offices you have around the world. And in a lot of sense, you've sort of decentralized your organization. I had the pleasure of working with your team in Riyadh and in Asia. sort of what have been sort of some of your big goals during the building phase of Sandbox or the acquired times in our industry that have sort of prepared you and equipped you for this moment?

Sebastien Borget: So there's one thing I don't believe and I never believed is like, oh, like, Metaverse is dead. I never believed it, obviously. But Wave 3 is dead, like nothing is happening. Nobody's buying NFTs and so on. So I think it's always a matter of like looking at the markets where, given it's our niche markets, where things are actually happening. And two years back, when we saw like there was a lowering interest from the western side, US and Europe. Actually, we stopped looking at Asia and we felt like, well, actually, it all started in Asia somehow. Sandbox had been acquired by Animoca Brands, a company from Hong Kong. Our first investors were Square Enix in Japan. hashed in Korea. Korea has been one of the leading markets for the managers in terms of, like, sound adoption and, like, the number of grants and partners, Hong Kong as well. So for the past two years, we've shifted focus in all those, in the broader Asia region, in those markets, as well in, like, new developing market in GCC in Saudi Arabia that are opening themselves to culture, entertainment, and web-free. And we felt like, we have to become, to be present, to show what we can do, because we already have a platform, a tool, and so many examples, and we have a passion team on the ground. We didn't bring a big team. It's usually one or two people on the ground that represent Sandbox, and bringing always the same rhythm. brands, creators, and an ecosystem around that wants to reach our products. And that has been a success recipe for Sandbox to grow. Asia represents 40% to date of our user base, our partners, number of landowners, etc. Saudi Arabia is the latest addition to the countries where Sandbox is present. We have teams in Singapore, in Thailand, in Vietnam, in Hong Kong, in Korea, in Japan, in Turkey, in India. And every market has different aspects and cultures. Some countries, they are not yet. Cryptocurrencies by itself is, I would say, either like not allowed or a gray area. So China and Saudi Arabia fit with that definition. Saudi Arabia is not necessarily legal or illegal. You don't really know. But there's something that's interesting where free and sandbox provide as a solution. And there's markets where actually adoption of crypto is the largest, and that's Southeast Asia, for example. And Sandbox is very well positioned there because of the brand and creator approach and the gamification behind that people could see and play.

Josh Kriger: But that explains why I saw you all over the world, in Hong Kong, in Bangkok, in Riyadh, where you spoke at Outer Edge Riyadh, and I can sort of assure the audience and our listeners at home, there's a lot of interesting things happening in the MENA region in Saudi Arabia, where you have, you know, a population that the average age is 35.

Sebastien Borget: Indeed, like in all those territories, like sometimes more than half of the population is like Gen Z, 30 or below. Saudi Arabia is very interesting because also the Kenick market in general, I think that they are the number one in the whole MENA region in terms of like purchase power play and the government has been really pushing first with esports. Like it's been amazing, like everything that's been put in place in terms of like empowering their population through gaming. We were at that conference where we heard Pritz himself talk about his vision of like how gaming is a great equalizer of chances and opportunity for the citizen, his country and population. And I think like Web3 as well. And that's why they're really deeply looking at embracing it.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think that does make a follow up question, though, is which how do you balance fun and financial incentives with sort of a broader market play? We know at this point you crank up the financial incentives and you end up with a graveyard pretty quickly. Right. So how are you sort of looking at that balance these days?

Sebastien Borget: Well, I think first of all, it's pretty fun to earn. In general, everyone is happy to earn something. And before, if you think about mobile gaming and free-to-play, anything you earn was mutual. But there was always this constant dopamine effect, like any action you did, There's this reward that makes you feel happy, you progress, you level up, you complete a tutorial, you click a button and wow, everything is so amazing. Web3 has been turning those moments into actual real life. giving real value to those rewards you were earning before. It was not just purely virtual. And then it's all about product and focus on gameplay. And that's something that, again, at Sandbox, we were very hyper-focused on. You don't imagine the number of meetings we have internally to understand how we deliver good 3Cs, like camera, control, and character, so we make it enjoyable. I must recognize that Sandbox 42 or 3 years ago wasn't as fun as it is today, but we've continued to ship regular updates, adding new rules, much better gameplay, different improvements that make the game load much faster, more fun to play. Without a good product, at the end of the day, the financial incentives alone aren't sufficient. But if you have both, actually that's where the success will trigger.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, right on that. That makes a lot of sense. And I was going to ask you sort of how you've evolved, how your vision has evolved since when you and Arthur founded Sandbox. Sounds like there's been more of an orientation or progression towards Spawn, but what are some of the other sort of evolving attributes of Sandbox since the beginning of the journey?

Sebastien Borget: I would say the first thing is we've been very consistent about the vision and the mission statement. It's something that you cannot say a lot with tech, but at Sandlot, since we started, how do we empower creators? How do we empower anyone to become a creator? through accessible tools, and we focus on the tools. We've been very creator-driven. 2024 was the year of the creator, that's what we announced, and we shipped on the new GameMaker 0.10. That new GameMaker has really improved the quality, diversity of gameplay, the loading time, and ultimately helped us to launch this Season 4 with people really at the top of quality, fun, and gameplay. We've also shared, like from the beginning, we embraced blockchain and NFT to allow the creator to monetize and to give out power of decision making, of like ownership of the land and the world that you're building together through demand, through the same token. And this year we shipped the DAO that was in May. Through the DAO, the community had been able to submit 16 proposals, vote on them, and there's been a lot of conversation on the forum. And now we recently introduced the delegates as well to represent the community. So we've been constantly delivering on the vision and not trying to chase the last hype. Like, we're aware about things happening about Meecon or our Telegram mini-app or so, and it's amazing. It keeps growing and bringing users certain quality manager in the space, but we didn't say, oh, our strategy is Telegram. He said, the network effect with Telegram is amazing, but we are first to focus on what we're building at Sandbox and see how we can bridge with that ecosystem somehow at some point. I think people appreciate that consistency as well.

Josh Kriger: Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Hamster combat was fun, but I didn't appreciate that $6 airdrop for all that work that I did. Clicky chicken buttons. Tell me a little bit more about what we can expect in 2025 in terms of the technology, the experience. What's some of the new ground that you'll be breaking this upcoming year?

Sebastien Borget: But I don't know if there will be anything major groundbreaking. We cannot revolutionize every year what's happening. In my mind, big, major technological shit happens roughly every 10 years. But what we want to do next year is just keep doing better, what we are doing great already. So basically, the Alpha Season 4 has been showing us the way, like what works with live art and events. So instead of doing one season, we'll be doing four seasons next year. A bit shorter, a bit less content, because 100 Efforts in 10 weeks was quite a lot. So we'll adjust and test around that. We continue to ship product updates. We gave today a little teaser of what's coming on the GameMaker 0.11 release to some of our top creators who came in person in Los Angeles, and I think they were quite excited about those new possibilities. What they will make with this will allow us to keep increasing the fun, the engagements, and beyond. Besides that, we are also like one of the focus areas on remade Web3. So how do we continue being a pioneer in Web3 and decentralization? So the DAO will continue to evolve to make sure like participation, engagement, and it creates impact by having governance for the community. And we want to evolve the sandbox. That's maybe the biggest shift, let's see. People think that Sandbox is only the current Sandbox platform, with the game makers and the game players and so on. But for us, I think Sandbox can lead a much bigger gaming ecosystem. We already see that the SAND token, which is like a top 5 token according to CoinMarketCap, is being adopted by other games, by other platforms, events, its utility has increased. So earlier this year, we launched the Voxel Games program. We already partnered with two game studios, Fright Games and DevHouse. The Voxel Games Program intends to publish or co-produce games with third-party developers, games that are built with UDT or Unreal, that are published on App Store, Google Play Store, Epic, Steam, etc. So other stores, platforms, and others. And those games, they will just have like Voxel graphics, and they will have the possibility to connect to the wallets as user-based sandboxes. 6.3 billion users who own lands, who own sand, who own avatars, valuable users that they can tap into and enables the owner of certain assets like our avatar or land to use it to those games. So bridging a bit Web 2 and Web 3 and building a bigger gaming ecostate supported by sand That vision will expand Sandbox and Sun powering a bigger Galena ecosystem, always with a mindset of building it in a decentralized way. So Sandbox right now is more like the application layer. And we know large applications with large audiences also can benefit from having a lower layer in the blockchain ecosystem where users can build their own decentralized app, access a token. And so it makes a lot of sense for us to look into this project and keep growing a bigger ecosystem next year.

Josh Kriger: That's really cool. I wasn't aware of the extent to which people are adopting sand outside of the sandbox. There's probably some cool phrase there, marketing campaign for this year. But I guess the other side of it, you're working with bigger brands, bigger game developers. How do you keep the independent creator top of mind and balance that side of the equation?

Sebastien Borget: So actually, yeah, we're going to bring a massive Alternate Man franchise next year as well. It will be very, very interesting. A lot of new gameplay coming up for that. And so, like, how do you keep having on one side, like, the top brands coming in and on the other side, like, be a platform that's UGC-centric? I think, like, they are not opposite, actually, and that's one of our strengths. So, like, we match, we bring brands and traders together. Through the brands, we inspire more and more creators to see you can make your own game with Attack on Titan, with Terminator, with Stoogedog, with celebrities you enjoy. And you cannot do games with them on any other platform out there. Even if there's brands collaboration on Fortnite and Roblox, you cannot do your own game with the official asset from the brand there. So we're going to continue launching those game jams supported by some of the brands or not. Like we also have Build Paris, Build Tokyo and other ideas. We'll have a new Builder Challenge. The Builder Challenge has been... We launched our Year VCO 2 Builder Challenge. It lasted 10 weeks and they offered over 1,000,000 in reward to the creators who publish content on their land and drive traffic to the platform. And it's been one of the most successful drivers of more and more creators because there is a good incentive for them to publish, but also because we are providing a lot of the training and education, the academy, the resource to our community as well. to involve those creators. So it's a combination of both to support new creators to keep entering the platform.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, that's great that you're trying to think about the independent creators too, because I feel like they felt like they were getting lost as these bigger brands were entering the space. And I think that's led to this sort of more of a degen culture, but I think there is room for everyone, you know, in the grander scheme with projects like Sandbox. So we know how the markets have responded to the political winds, a new administration. As we're speaking, Bitcoin has been dancing above 100K, that threshold that we all dreamed could happen. I think it was a sense of validation. For all of us that told our friends that we were doing things in the blockchain industry and they thought we were crazy, to have a Fitcoin over that 100k Mars, pretty radical jump from 60k in a short amount of time. What are the longer term sort of implications, in your opinion, of this new administration on web free policies in the US and how that will affect the global landscape? What are some of your biggest hopes from this change and your biggest fears?

Sebastien Borget: Well, I think we're all pretty much optimistic of what's coming forward for the next two years in the US. There seems to be a signal that's both on the market side but in general, like this new government place is going to embrace more technology in general and probably more crypto and web-free as well. And that seems to be a good thing in terms of what we're doing specifically, because we're working with brands, we're working with users, and so far the lack of clarity or the signal that's been sent by the US has been essentially driving away a lot of U.S. entrepreneurs and a lot of U.S. users to actually be able to interact with cryptocurrencies or with Web3 in general. It sent a signal that it was something like... It's very hard to work from the legal side or regulatory side. And so it really hinders the adoption from this side of the world. And you know, I think it's the ambiguity, right? Exactly. And whereas there is ambiguity somewhere, entrepreneurs are not going to wait for the ambiguity to be resolved. So a lot of like the talent in the U.S. actually moved to Dubai, moved maybe to Saudi Arabia, let's say Asia. where there's been much more clear framework around what's possible and what's not possible regarding virtual assets, digital assets, and so on. And Asia really benefited from that. Hong Kong, Korea, we've seen Dubai attracting a lot of users, money, and so on. And I like that the US is not going to let that, hopefully, with the COP26 get in that sense.

Josh Kriger: Yeah, I mean, I think we've seen with our industry, give us a playbook and a set of rules. We'll figure it out. We'll do cool things. We'll keep innovating. But the ambiguity is stifling to innovation and the potential. We're happy to play by the rules. I think we've seen progress with any rule book as long as the rules are defined. So this has been really cool. I want to hear what the audience has to say as well. But you've been on the show. We've done Edge Quick Hitters before, which is a part of our show where we get to know our interviewees a little bit better. But I had a couple fun questions that I haven't asked you before. And then we'll get the audience questions. So if your Sit-Box avatar could have one superpower in real life, what would it be and why?

Sebastien Borget: Hey, you know, like, okay, we're in the US, you're thinking like the super power I have is to be super cool, like can make a comic book around it and so on. I was thinking deep about that question. I think like, just knowing that I can make an impact into people's life every day by like giving them this magic. Like you never thought you can make a game, like you could build your own and now you can. And I've seen that impact actually, there was by meeting the creators, their story. Recently there was this documentary made in Philippines where like school, young students like coming from very poor areas, didn't have access normally to school, et cetera. They were given this chance and like they discovered VoxEdit, made a game, published it, and now think of like a whole different path for their life, for their career. So just that, just like touching someone and allowing them to think like you can create something, be a creator.

Josh Kriger: I love that. And looking back, what advice would you give yourself when the sandbox was just an idea?

Sebastien Borget: Well, maybe like... When we did Sandbox in 2011 as a mobile game, it was not the only game that we were working on. So back then, at Pixel, or by Game Studio, we were also doing CC builders, and we had a few successful games, even though Sandbox was really the top. And I think, like, my advice was like, you know, just focus on the one thing that's the most successful, and keep doubling down your effort on it. Thank you.

Josh Kriger: One last question. What's the one thing you hope people can take away from being here tonight, the Sandbox Awards earlier, this event around Sandbox and its future?

Sebastien Borget: Future is bright. I think we can all share the enthusiasm now, particularly in the US, and anything is possible. We've proven during this Sandbox Award that people who recently started making games could be recognized, could be showcased alongside major brands, be given, like featuring, well, towards hundreds of thousands of users, hopefully millions of users next year. So all of that is accessible, is doable. There is no magic. It's just one little thing that you need to do is just have that decision moment. I want to try that. I want to explore that. So be curious and hopefully see you in this space soon again. Renan, thank you very much.

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