we're going to give it a few more minutes to see if additional folks will trickle in but appreciate
let's do a quick mic check it sounds it says that you are a co-host but i think the twitter
ui is a bit buggy can you can you speak by any chance
all right everyone appreciate you guys joining let's give it another minute or two we're trying
to get on its mic working and then we'll go ahead and get started
and it looks like you are a speaker now can we go ahead and do a quick mic check here
hello hello yep sounds like we can hear you cool
Evan are we waiting for Amit to get his mic sorted i think so yeah he uh i think he probably
is restarting looks like okay yeah
all right let's try and comment can you uh do a quick mic check here
yes can you hear me yeah we can hear you um all right well let's go ahead and get started
hopefully uh more folks will trickle in as as the time progresses but i appreciate folks joining this
the AMA with with our great partners over at sandbox we recently announced the partnership with them
to help showcase all the great work that they've been doing in the gaming ecosystem to our broader
audience and so the next 30 minutes we're going to be chatting a little bit more about what the
sandbox team have been up to and hear a little bit more about Amit and Evan's background so i think
it'd be great just to do a quick round of intros maybe Amit you can go ahead and start and then
we can take it from there yeah sure and thanks Brandon for for hosting us i'm super excited to
get to chat with the later three community um i'm Amit Kumar i'm the chief marketing officer at
the sandbox so oversee all of our traditional marketing as well as our more performance like
acquisition growth oriented marketing and our data team as well and i'll pass it on to you Evan
Hey everyone my name is Evan head of influencer marketing and i've been with the sandbox for about
one and a half years now so excited to be here cool and then behind the mic on the layer three
side is Brandon Kumar i'm one of the co-founders here and i spend most of my time on growth and
partnerships um so Amit or Evan i think a great place to start would just be to maybe define
or explain to the audience what the sandbox is and how long you guys have been around and how
consumers or users should think about your ecosystem yeah sure so the sandbox is a virtual
world or metaverse we don't shy away from the the term uh although i would say it's had its ups and
ups and downs and we're essentially a a no-code metaverse in which we have a multi-sided ecosystem
we have creators and we have a no-code uh creation tool or actually multiple that allow
anyone to for free start creating experiences it could be games it could be virtual spaces social
hubs museums galleries whatever and then they publish to the sandbox platform upon which we
have the player side of the ecosystem who are then able to play on all those different experiences
that are created by by the the end users on the creator side of the ecosystem and then importantly
i guess some of the things that are are you know i think more unique to the sandboxes we have this
concept of the map and so we have 166,464 individual plots of land that comprise of a finite map uh
kind of like you would think of in like an mmo like rpg type of environment and each of those
pieces of land each of those plots of land are nfts that are owned by end users by brands by
celebrities by partners we have etc and that's a finite amount that'll never change and so
essentially creators publish their experiences to that land to land that they own on the sandbox
so it has this kind of persistent tangible nature that then allows players to navigate across the
map across all these different experiences and in the virtual world that we're building
so i know there's a couple different elements that we outlined but hopefully it generally makes sense
no it's that's super helpful can you share a little bit about um kind of the audience today so
how many users are uh i guess gaming or playing in the the sandbox ecosystem and what is the typical
user persona are these folks new to crypto do they tend to be more active users maybe give a
little bit of color behind kind of the actual person or persona behind the ecosystem yeah sure
so we in terms of the actual like active users so we recently crossed 5.7 million
accounts created on the sandbox obviously like since our uh uh inception which uh the
current version of the platform launched in 2021 late 2021 um for some quick context on on the
history of of the sandbox we actually originally were a mobile game uh by the same name um and
it was a 2d like pixel style uh builder game so you were able to create like creators were able to
build with drag and drop functionality like simple landscapes and environments and things like that
in the 2d format and publish them to to a gallery within the mobile app and that was it there was
no player component there was no monetization or anything like that and that original game
launched in in 2012 and grew to over 40 million users and so it was definitely a relatively
successful and popular mobile game and the vision came with with uh the rise of blockchain and its
impact on on gaming to essentially try to pivot the the current platform into the version that
we have now which is a largely desktop focused metaverse and the key i would say trigger for
this is we looked at our creator ecosystem in the mobile game and saw that we had creators investing
countless hours of time energy resources effort work into building things within the sandbox
and then they published it and they had no ownership or control over the assets that they
just invested so much into um and i think that's something that's really commonplace in gaming uh
not just in ubc creation but even in you know classic traditional games there's just this
kind of a weird imbalance between the amount of investment that's going towards the player and
creator side towards accruing virtual goods or currency or whatever but ultimately that currency
only has value and is is retained in terms of ownership by the publisher and so we wanted to
kind of flip down on its head and introduce the concept of true digital ownership with the
sandbox and so we built we rebuilt the sandbox platform upon the blockchain to where anything
that is uh created uh by our end users is minted as an nft and they actually retain ownership
rights to that asset outside of the sandbox entirely for them to uh monetize on or off the
platform and for them to to do whatever they wish with it and so in terms of giving some some numbers
i mentioned the 5.7 million uh accounts created we've also had uh we've recently surpassed over
a thousand experiences published to our map by end users and we only opened up the ability for
that to happen for end users to publish uh about uh six months ago and so we're really excited by
that milestone previously only like partners and brands that we work directly with were able to
publish um and we now have over 330 000 creators that are worked uh in the last 12 months that
are uh publishing and building in this sandbox alongside over 200 professional studios um that
are building on behalf of their own partners and ip's and things like that and so yeah it's it's
definitely growing quickly we have over 25 000 owners of the virtual land that i mentioned um
and uh over 200 000 wallets as well that that own sand our our token uh so ecosystem is has been
been growing even though we're still really early yeah i mean massive congrats guys i think that
one of the things you do well is sort of highlight the composability and it obviously makes sense for
you to bring your gaming ecosystem on chain and it seems like it's opened up a really interesting
design space on the creator side in addition to the studios but i think it might make sense to
transition to you know what these creators and studios are are actually publishing and what kind
of games um are available to consumers so maybe we can spend a little bit of time there i'm not
sure that's better for you amit or evan yeah evan why don't why don't you take this one and kind of
like i mean the short answer is that it's there's a really diverse array of of experiences um on the
map but evan if you want to highlight some of the more interesting ones that you've come across
uh that'd be great yeah so i'd say um i've been playing with sandbox also around the time since
i've joined so i've been playing for about a year and a half uh i had our data team look up
how long i've been playing it's it's over like 200 hours so i have a good sense of like what's
available um to play i'd say um one of the game types that i like is resource management so like
think uh stardew valley um as like an example uh one of our users that actually is also a
creator for us created this game based off of like resource management concept and so you're
essentially like a worker in a factory and your job is to create uh t-shirts and so like in order
to do that you have to like uh get uh sheep like you have to buy sheep and then the sheep like
produce wool and then you have to keep the sheep like happy and fed and so um that was like a
game that that has like a pretty strong uh replayability factor uh and and i enjoyed
playing it a lot but then there's also these other types of games like um i remember one
called lollympics and basically it's like a 12-part series of just wacky games uh
like for example you can like shoot a uh shoot an egg into like a pan and that the one that
when the egg cracks in the pan it starts cooking and it's just like a really wacky fun
sports game and so there's 12 different types of games in that one as well um so there's like a
huge breadth and depth of games in our ecosystem and we have um game jams pretty much
round the clock throughout the year um to help produce keep producing these types of ugc content
yeah and for for context on the game jam essentially it's a contest we have for our
end users who are creators and typically we have a specific theme or game mechanic and it's an
open contest that'll last several weeks and anybody can can enter and then we award uh the like they
then share their actual end experiences that are along those those themes and then we award
huge prizes and visibility and featuring uh to the winning experiences and so it's a way for us to
showcase the creations of the community while also getting more actual experiences published to our
map and rewarding them um and to evan's point like i think the core premise of what we're
trying to build is you have this map of thousands of different plots of land and all of them have
an immense variety of different types of experiences and a lot of them are games and
there's amazing games available um evan mentioned resource management uh we also have ones that are
around social deduction and and survival and parkour and and we're starting to now see things
as we add functionality to our game maker side our creation side like more things in line with
fpses and such one of the really interesting things about i guess what we're building is
it's not so much a game but rather the game engine the underlying ability to build without
any code which is unique to us i do think the vast majority of the popular um ugc engines out there
have the ability to script which is very powerful and amazing but for us we wanted to prioritize
access and so our entire um creation tool set is no code which allows for that access but it also
makes it really challenging if you're trying to incorporate more and more sophisticated types
of gameplay and so every few months our team is hard at work um pushing new updates increasing
the complications of what you can do uh logical progressions and rule systems and things like that
and so we're really excited about what's able to be created now and even more excited with
with uh with what's to come and so one of the uh the themes that you guys were we're sort of
touching on just now is the diversity of experiences users have on the sandbox um and
also what creators and studios can can create but let's say your you know semi-casual or
avid gamer was unfamiliar with what the sandbox is how would you go about framing um kind of the
ecosystem of the metaverse that you guys have built to to that type of user
yeah i think you want to take this one
yeah uh i would say if you've ever played and i i grew up as an old school gamer so i used to
play like you know warcraft 3 so i have like uh the example of uh whatever people had like
these custom maps like you would just go to the custom map section and like it would be
just a ton of things that you could you could filter out and play uh that's how i ended up
playing like you know the now famous mobile dota um but basically yeah if you're if you're just
starting out in sandbox for the very first time uh and like Amit said like you open up the map
you can kind of filter through different types of game genres that you like or even ones that you
think are very uh you know potentially attractive to you uh another example is obviously like uh
youtube right like youtube is like this whole ecosystem of uh different types of videos you
can kind of find something that fits your interests and you know obviously you'll be um
amazed at like what other people can create uh based off of like the tools that we have on
our platform so uh it's it's basically like a youtube or even like a tiktok uh for example
and it's the ability to kind of find um different types of game genres but also index on
the ones that you as a as a gamer uh would enjoy and then a key point i got to that is
the web 3 component of play to earn and so uh the virtual the currency that that you're
rewarded for playing different games and we have different events that are always ongoing and things
like that is sand um and so you are able to actually like earn sand uh our utility token
by playing and completing quests and doing different things and so that's an important part
of the the uh appeal i think as well which is you love gaming you love trying different types
of games why not actually be rewarded in a meaningful way uh for playing yeah that last
part is is an issue one so one of the common um i think themes of the past six months has been
2024 and 2025 will be the year that on-chain gaming or crypto enabled gaming comes into focus
you guys have obviously done a tremendous amount of work there the immutable ecosystem and and
even some of these larger l2s like optimism arbitrage from linea they're investing heavily
in the gaming ecosystem so you know you guys are are in this day in and day out how have
you seen the progression on the infrastructure side do you feel like we're finally at a point now
where you know a mainstream user who perhaps doesn't really care or know much about crypto
can uh begin playing some of these games and earn things like sand but not necessarily need
to worry about the complexities or the nuances of of using products on chain
yeah it's a really good question um and obviously very topical for a company like like
us it's something we think about and that i think about every day i think
the biggest thing i've seen in terms of the progression over the past i would say a year
and a half two years in web3 gaming is i think in 2021 is roughly where i would probably timestamp
it we had our initial waves of or an initial wave of of web3 games and what i saw and what we kind
of like learned in hindsight was they were treating the on-chain component as not just
a feature but the core draw for why you should want to play and the thing that they left behind
was that the game actually just has to be fun like in order to attract uh any sort of
web2 traditional gamer the game has to be fun there we we overstated this demand or maybe even
invented this demand in web2 gaming that oh traditional gamers like they require having
this web3 component so if we have web3 in our game that's all we need to attract the audience
and so i think for us we're very focused on on having the web3 side of the sandbox be a feature
rather than the foundation of what we're building and so our hope is that if you're already web3
native like you can come right in you can sign in with your wallet and you could immediately
start earning and doing all these things but ideally this what we're building that serves as
like an aspect of utility and we want to make sure that a traditional gamer still is able to
come in and have fine games that are unique and fun enough to play uh like and stand on their own
and then they use that as a vehicle to get introduced to the web3 side where they're like
okay cool i am accruing sand that's interesting if i actually want to claim it or i got this nft
uh wearable asset or whatever and now if i want to actually create a wallet and
ecosystem but the entry point is not that and in fact you know one of the first things when i joined
the company is we originally required um like the only way to sign up for an account was by
integrating with a wallet and yeah it was an immensely like difficult onboarding journey from
scratch for like web2 gamers who had no sense of a wallet is and it's it's a very like hard
concept to explain you're sending them to a third party uh integration and they also have this like
simplistic sense of like oh it's what i thought this was free like why don't you connect a wallet
and all that type of stuff and so we almost had to take a step backwards in some sense where we now
allow email sign up and and social signups with facebook and google etc and then we're trying
to defer some of the web3 specific onboarding to further along once they're already invested
in the ecosystem and and have a reason to care and so i think that's kind of been been our
approach but but to me i hope and from the projects that i've seen coming out um you know we work with
like dogami as an example and that's one that comes to mind since they just launched and have
a big tournament going on um the games themselves are really really fun and then the web3 aspect is
a feature rather than the core i don't know evan if you have anything to add to that yeah a couple
things uh in terms of the onboarding flow what i've seen recently in the space is um people can
now pay by credit card uh instead of like having to go through like the web3 wallet part and also
like um transact through crypto so that's a little bit more um seamless onboarding uh that i've seen
and then to mitt's point about um other games in the space and having the gameplay come first
uh yeah i think i've seen uh more recently nifty island doing some pretty cool things
they kind of have like a little fortnite look and feel uh and then they kind of
have a island that you can kind of design uh on your on your own so yeah it's a very very cool
concept and definitely you know gameplay um gameplay first mentality are there any specific
milestones or pieces of infrastructure that you feel still need to be solved to make the sandbox
experience even smoother and better or anything in the roadmap in the next i call it six to six to
twelve months that you guys think will dramatically change sort of the ux yeah there's there's a couple
i mean i'll be super like honest in saying that we're so really early um you know we we often get
like probably the game that or platform that we get compared to the most when we explain what
we're doing is roblox and the thing i would say is people don't realize that roblox was founded in
2004 and they've been they've been building this for for 20 plus years usually i think
uh people even gamers are shocked when they hear that so we recognize that what we're trying to
build is very hard and we're very early to point about like big milestones so right now we're really
trying to improve the load time of of uh all of our clients are both our creation uh platform but
also the actual sandbox like platform itself uh so how we get it to load and load faster and load
seamlessly um we're introducing a launcher that's going to be coming uh within the next uh few
months at most which will allow us to be able to have like overly up to updates and and uh make the
whole experience way more seamless versus how it is now so i would say a big one for us is just
lessening the friction from when you create an account to actually getting into game like the
whole like download and launch and that type of side of things we also have a lot of improvement
to make into startup tue that's been a focus of late um so when you first enter like yes are are
a huge part of our our philosophy is this no code creation process on the on the creator side of the
ecosystem but that doesn't mean it's something that like oh you right away just can can pick up
and be an expert at there still is a lot of uh complication to the tool which i think is necessary
but we then need to have like proper tutorials and proper documentation and so we've been
working hard at building out our gift book and now we want to have tutorials within the client
itself and so those are some of the things that that come to mind um there's also the topic of
you know custodial versus non-custodial wallets when we talk about like friction of the web3
onboarding stuff something that we're thinking about um and lastly i would say you know this is
probably going to push the six to twelve month time frame a little bit but we are you know
primarily desktop right now but we are thinking about alternative platforms it's still early stage
for us but what does the sandbox look like on mobile and in the mid-term what does it look like
um in xr you know super super helpful um maybe shifting gears to some of the work that we've
done together with layer 3 and sandbox um we'll love to chat a little bit more about our current
campaign and how you guys have experienced the results on the sandbox side being now introduced
to the layer 3 community and showcasing some of the different experiences for users to to our
audience um either evan or amit maybe you guys can just give a quick overview on kind of the
campaign and the partnership and jump into the experience that you guys have had on your end
yeah um evan do you want to outline the the campaigns that we've set up thus far with layer
3 and then i can dive into kind of the results sure sure uh currently three campaigns are running
so like um in terms of quests there are three so the first quest is uh basically sign up with your
wallet um and then quest number two is play three experiences and then quest number three is come back
uh the following day and complete a quest
cool and then in terms of the results i mean so our mindset overall was
and both evan and i come from like traditional gaming backgrounds and then we're marketers
and so we're used to doing like you know the classic paid social ads youtube ads programmatic
ads and so but in the sandbox we realized that the the acquisition funnel for getting new users
into the sandbox it has to be very different it has to start with web 3 and so that's what brought
us to layer 3 itself is um the idea of actually embracing like the questing and and the reward
nature of that's inherent to web 3 i feel and the results have been really really stellar for us
obviously it's it's very early i think we launched our first campaign on thursday um so just a
couple days but the first quest which was signing up with a wallet i believe hit its cap within a few
minutes of going live and then um we've very very quickly been progressing and seeing great scale
on the play side of the the quest so actually diving in and playing multiple experiences
in the sandbox and then actually coming back the next day and doing more and uh so we're
incredibly incredibly uh happy and excited about the the early results and now our mind immediately
shifts to how do we start to structure campaigns that incentivizes and encourages the layer 3 community
to be a part of the sandbox ecosystem in in the long term yeah and on that note can you share a
little bit about how the current sandbox community can like engage with the core team and interact
with other other gamers i imagine you guys have an active discord but maybe a call to action for
folks who are looking to one learn more and to be a more active participant in the sandbox
ecosystem yes so discord is definitely um like you know we have uh i think around 290 000 people in
our discord and it's very active um and so that would be a great place to start and we could link
to to our discord uh as well and uh beyond that i would say becoming an owner is the next typical
progression for people looking to be a bigger part and invest in the ecosystem and what i mean by
owner is um buying land uh which you can obviously do in the secondary market in places
like open sea but also we do land drops around different neighborhoods and themes and interests
and that's a way to become more involved and then it gives you the ability to to publish an experience
if you want to create also owning an avatar um is another really big one and that's not just the
vanity aesthetic of oh cool i have this like unique looking avatar to play with in the sandbox
which is of course an nft as well but we also provide like specific utilities to to avatar
owners and so uh typically a lot of our different events and experiences have sand reward pools
that are exclusively available for avatar or land owners and so they get to take part of that
and it's not any sort of gotcha or or like rng mechanic it's if you complete the necessary quests
not unlike a lighter three type of format you will receive part of the sand pool
exclusive to avatar and landowners as well as there being a free tier uh you know reward pool
as well and beyond that we do we have different experiences and events that have nft gating systems
and so you get access to exclusive different areas and levels and and experiences challenges
and things like that um so i would say joining the community in in our discord following us on
twitter both of our our main sandbox game handle as well as we have a creator specific handle
uh and then just becoming an owner and an active participant and contributor to the community as well
all of that um well as we wrap up i would love to maybe ask both of you guys a personal question
about your experience at the sandbox what has been your favorite memory or the most rewarding part
of your time working on this project
oh you go first seven uh i would say being able to work with um various types of ip's
and and the most recent one i guess maybe because it's the most recent it sticks in my memory
uh is is working with the habo community on their upcoming avatar drop they've been really great
to work with um and very collaborative and uh have nothing but good things to say about them
uh but yeah just being able to work with various types of ip's um sandbox has you know over 400
different types of partners and brands and so being able to kind of um get to know these types
of ip's and their um ideas when it comes to working in web 3 has been very refreshing
uh and then one other note obviously you know uh the layer 3 team has been very great to work
with as well brandon so um very also collaborative and responsive so kudos to you for building a
great team really appreciate that and yeah from my side it's on a similar note and i guess
we mentioned that we work with ip's and brands but specifically those one of the unique aspects of
the sandbox is on that map it's filled with different recognizable brands and ip's and
they're building experiences right alongside end users and so i think that's pretty unique
and and to that end i have a similar one but the example that i'll give is um gucci
and so we launched an experience with gucci um a couple months ago uh end of last year and
it was really unique to me because it's less so perhaps a brand that i would associate with
with what we're building but we were able and we spent a lot of time talking about the gaming
uh side of the sandbox which is obviously very core and inherent to what we do but what gucci
ended up doing was they had a um a real life exhibition an archival exhibition that showed
off like all these different uh fashion collections that they'd had over the past decades and they had
this in london irl um we had to buy tickets to go and they came to sandbox and wanted to build
a version of that in the metaverse that would allow anybody to be able to go
and and visit it and so uh seeing that come to life in such a different use case of the
platform that we were doing and uh the actual like end experience was just absolutely stunning
and the trailers available on twitter and on youtube um that was really really cool to think
about like that for me like flip the switch from oh it's not just like a collection of games
but it's also just real experiences and people are going to come up with all these different
types of things that they want to do another example is like steve ioki like wanted to build
a playhouse where you pick up cake and throw it at other players and throw it at the wall and so
we did that you know and so the diversity of of how both end users and ip's uh find ways to engage
with what we've built is has been really rewarding um yeah it's very cool the the steve oki thing is
uh i didn't know about that but appreciate you guys appreciate you guys joining and obviously
the kind words uh towards layer three we've we've enjoyed working with you guys i think the
results have been great we're excited to double down here um for folks who are in the audience
are listening to the recording if you haven't already we encourage you to to check out the
the existing campaign on layer 3 so head to layer3.xoz backslash communities backslash the sandbox
um or you can just keep an eye on our socials for for the announcements there um and uh yeah we'll
be doing a bunch more work hopefully in the sandbox ecosystem over the next few months and
excited to share more in the coming weeks appreciate you guys joining thanks so much brennan
and thanks to the layer 3 team and more importantly the community um it's been really um really
rewarding and fulfilling for us to see the layer 3 community like embrace this sandbox and enter
the ecosystem and as brennan said it's just a start we definitely plan on uh having a lot of
different campaigns and quests and work together in the months to come and so hopefully you guys
will continue to support the project that we're building thanks so much 100 all right guys have
a great week thanks everyone bye