The Sandbox’ LAND plots sold for more than $1.66 million

The Sandbox has completed the sales of its virtual land plots, raising more than $1.66 million in the past few weeks.

Players can purchase LAND plots to develop games and other attractions in the metaverse. LAND in The Sandbox is represented by NFTs that identify digital ownership. These LAND plots exist alongside many well-known IPs such as Warner Music Group, Ubisoft, the Walking Dead and more.

Purchasing LAND requires The Sandbox’s native currency, $SAND. Its holders will get NFTs that verify their ownership, allowing players to go and develop their plots to make them more valuable.

Since November 22, The Sandbox has completed sales on two chunks of virtual land and two more LAND collections, in addition to selling 1,900 virtual parcels. The platform artificially limits the number of plots of land to protect user investments.

CEO Arthur Madrid and COO Sebastian Borget have been running The Sandbox for 10 years. Madrid said they are excited about making the game a web3 platform, aiming to make it a safe place to create and receive NFTs. In an interview, Borget said virtual land is the easiest way to understand web3.

“The Sandbox has an approach where we make the metaverse more concrete and more tangible than anywhere else in the world. We tie it to the sale of land and have this concept of a map,” Borget said.

Sandbox’s LAND parcel value

Blockchain Research Lab has recently analyzed the land market to determine the worth of The Sandbox’s LAND parcels. After Facebook rebranded itself into Meta in October 2021, LAND saw a price increase. In January 2022, it cost around $12,000 per lot.

However, during the crypto crash in November 2022, LAND’s price plummeted to around $2,000 to $2,200 per lot, although sales continued at a healthy pace. The analysis suggests that people were aware that LAND investments could pay off later.

In 2022, The Sandbox resold around 10,000 LAND parcels with an average return of 109 percent to resells. Less than half of the resales ended in a loss, with an average return of 15 percent. Around 64 percent of landowners only had one LAND parcel, while there was only two percent with more than 51 parcels.

Blockchain Research Lab’s analysis shows that the number of active wallets has been increasing. Currently, average landowners have around eight parcels of LAND.

Partnership with OpenZeppelin to improve security

Last Thursday, The Sandbox announced a partnership with OpenZeppelin, the leading blockchain infrastructure security provider, to prevent attacks within the metaverse.

OpenZeppelin will be responsible for auditing smart contracts, monitoring vulnerabilities and detecting any potential threats to the metaverse.

“The pieces that make up a metaverse puzzle are intricate and extensive and there is a lot to keep an eye on,” OpenZeppelin developer advocate Stephen Lloyd Webber said. “The practice of auditing has proven essential in deploying existing Web3 services.”

Borget said working with OpenZeppelin would not only increase security in the present but also continue to pinpoint vulnerabilities as The Sandbox continues to develop. With over 4.3 million registered wallets, the platform has become a major player in Web3.

“OpenZeppelin’s security services help build a reliable framework and reinforce trust in our ecosystem, a key factor in onboarding more newcomers to our platform and to Web3 as a whole,” Borget said.