That cute game suffered a setback when Apple representatives said the graphics were too crude. Borget showed me games such as Doodle Grub. I wrote about them back in 2013, when they were running their company as Pixowl in Paris. OriginsĪnd the investment is a big validation for the strategy of The Sandbox founders Arthur Madrid and Sebastien Borget (Borget will be speaking at our GamesBeat Summit Next online event on November 9-10). Since NFTs can authenticate digital ownership, you could take the assets and avatars you buy in one world and take them to another. DappRadar, measuring the broader NFT market beyond just Ethereum, reported that NFT sales hit $1.2 billion in the first quarter, $1.3 billion in the second quarter, and a whopping $10.7 billion in the third quarter as games such as Axie Infinity took off.įans also believe NFTs will usher in the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, like in novels such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One. It’s been as volatile as cryptocurrency trading for Bitcoin, but it has steadily gone up. But then it rose again in August and September, took a dip, but grew steadily. Kotaku wrote that the NFT bubble had burst. The popularity of NFTs have exposed some serious drawbacks too in numerous scams where people steal art and sell it as their own NFTs.īy May, the NFT market had crashed on Ethereum. In March, an NFT digital collage by the artist Beeple sold at Christie’s for $69.3 million. Dapper Labs has now seen sales and resales of those NFTs top $780 million. If you look at Google Trends, you’ll see that NFTs started picking up in February and skyrocketed after related NFT sales like digital art and NBA Top Shot took off.

Madrid and his cofounder Sebastien Borget said they want to build the metaverse. Arthur Madrid, CEO of The Sandbox, said in an interview that the funding will help the company grow beyond gaming into economies such as fashion, architecture, virtual concerts and shows, art galleries, museums, and more. The Sandbox is the first investment into crypto assets by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, though SoftBank also invested $680 million in Sorare, a Paris-based NFT fantasy soccer game maker with 30 employees.

Other investors in the round included Animoca Brands, True Global Ventures, Liberty City Ventures, Galaxy Interactive, Kingsway Capital, Blue Pool Capital, LG Technology Ventures, Alpaca VC, Graticule Asset Management Asia, Com2uS, executives at GoldenTree Asset Management, Nokota, Sun Hung Kai & Co, Sound Ventures, Red Beard Ventures, SCB 10X, Polygon Studios, Samsung Next, Double Down Partners, StakeFish, SterlingVC, and HodlCo. The money comes from the SoftBank Vision Fund 2, an estimated $30 billion fund from one of the world’s biggest companies.

100m nft the sandbox