Building the Open NFT Metaverse and its Jobs Opportunities

Transcript

all right let's get started hello everyone thanks for coming it's still uh it's almost 11 a.m but i guess the party was pretty strong yesterday so we'll go along first of all let me ask how many of you in the audience are now familiar with the sandbox raise your hands ah nice great progression so i've been speaking uh for many years in a space i've been a pioneer in nfts and i'm always curious to see how people are getting more and more aware about what we are doing so at sandbox we are building the open nft metaverse our idea is to create a virtual world where users and creators can be rewarded for their engagement and

the way they play they create they will own the content they make or they earn through gaming and also participate in the whole governance of that virtual world through the ownership of different assets through the use of nfts sun token and a few things we are going to see first of all let me introduce you for those of you who are not yet familiar with the concept of metaverse what it actually means and how we're implying implementing this concept in sandbox so the main averse it's a concept that's maybe that's been made popular through skyfi books and movies essentially a snow crush by neil stephenson

and ready player one the main idea is essentially that us human beings could live many different parallel experiences into parallel universes through an avatar an avatar that would be our virtual representation our new self into those virtual those parallel worlds so at sandbox we believe that by you will be able to live the experience through a 3d avatar or character and those experiments need to be made first and they will be made we think by users essentially 99 of the content will be made by users that's why we focus on content and we created a tool called vox edit

which is essentially an nft maker that allows anyone to make a 3d asset animate them and publish them on the marketplace and sell them to other users why voxels there's many benefits to use voxel first of all it's very accessible to anyone you can think of it like digital legos both kids know how to use it but you can have like artists and more like craft made impossible with thousands hundreds of thousands of pieces will take days months to produce and allow to make pieces that will be high value for the time and craft behind we also believe in bringing premium content premium through ips and brand

those ips and brands that are bringing the culture into this virtual world imagine yourself with an avatar you arrive into a place that you're not familiar with but suddenly you see some of the brands that and the content that you've seen before from the physical world you will quite naturally be attracted to them and that's what we want to replicate in sandbox by having culture having ips like smurf atari or walking dead that we announced recently they will bridge uh your for you as usual between the physical world and the virtual world but also they will provide a lot of content that you're already familiar with and something unique in sandbox into your user generated content platform

it will allow you to make your own games adventures stories etc using the content of those ips as nft and publish those experiments into sandbox where you can actually monetize those experience directly which is something you need talking about experiences we would like you to leave new kind of games engage with them on the content play socialize interact meet other users and of course participate in play to earn and earn a revenue stream from the time you spend the content you collect and earn through gaming to do that we and why are we say we are decentralized because we're using blockchain technology and

nfts and essentially in sandbox we believe in making users self-sovereign owning their own currency owning their own digital assets the game items and more the lands and owning their own identity through their avatar finally at sandbox since we know and in this decentralized matters as we understand now that nft can hold value we can build a whole digital economy around it with services and jobs so basically we want to open a lot of new job opportunities through people who are going to create content to animate the experiences and participate into commerce transaction and more around the

metaverse essentially we believe we are building the future of gaming where we are rewarding players and creators for their engagement the time they spend onto the platform it starts by owning a land piece of the metaverse into sandbox and building that land that's the main gateway to monetization for most of the creator those creators that will be able to make their own nfts very easily through tool called vox edit that's available for anyone can be used can be used also to make content outside of sandbox eventually as a way to to to teach and bring new people into the space we are strong believers into play to learn

and we want to show like how this business model that we've been explaining for many years already can allow users who spend time on the game and collect rewards also take away most of the revenue stream coming from those rewards and we believe into self-sovereignty of those users through ownership of their content we built the sandbox platform as a gaming ecosystem with four main components all most of those components are already available right now can be downloaded in beta so vox edit i was already referring to this 3d software it's available on pc and mac you can make 3d content and animate it

so it's ready to be used for gaming the marketplace which is a website where you can upload your assets turn them into nft and start selling trading them for other users and the game maker which is i think like the central piece to our ecosystem it allows anyone to make games without any programming knowledge there is not a single line of code you just drag and drop your nfcs into a scene you choose the behaviors and you make it an enemy a platform a building and more and you can already start creating games and experience in a second all of that allows you to then

create content that can be shared and monetize on the platform the last piece that we are going to introduce towards the end of the summer is the play part like how players will interact with the experience you create and pushing through new systems that involve nft gating and season reward i'll touch about it in a second that's essentially going to allow players to earn a revenue from their playtime however before i talk about that i want to show you as well like how we're integrating decentralization from the beginning we are now more than 100 employees at sandbox working across those different products i showed you a voxedit marketplace game maker i counted we have more than 32

nationalities in the team and you can see here like most of the team 48 people working on the production side of our different tour in argentina 20 in france strong presence in asia as well korea japan china which are top countries for sandbox and now opening an office in canada as well where we're attracting talent from the video game industry the metaverse it's a broad concept and i want to show you like how it's really an ecosystem behind so this is a study by new zoo that shows a little bit all the different companies that are contributing to the different stack of the metaverse as you can see they are centralized game platform like minecraft roblox

facebook horizon fortnite but there are also companies working into more avatar and identity user interface infrastructure login visualization of content connectivity behind payment solution wallets marketplace integrations and of course a few of the key actors into um decentralized virtual world which includes sandbox but also the central and crypto voxel and some new space which you might be familiar with as well in sandbox we have something unique as well which is our map of 166 464 lands in total each one is an actual erc721 nft it has a specific location and

the way we approach selling this map is the following we haven't sold it initially entirely but we release progressively months after months weeks after week small new neighborhoods new areas as of today we sold about 54 of the total map and we project to still have lands available until the end of 2022. with this approach combined with the idea that um land owners and content creator can and brands can put their own logo reinforcing the idea of ownership of your land parcel we are enabling to create a world where the value and the interest is not concentrated at

the center of the map but really spread out in any neighborhood any location and it's constantly evolving as new people are ensuring additionally to that um something also um we're really proud of in the way focusing again around decentralization is the unique number of landowners so far is about two hundred uniclan owner which means that there is no single person or entity that owns more than one percent of that virtual world when we are going to put in place the governance it will be we think the most democratic as possible so far among all the decentralized world something also unique at sandbox as we

expired the last two years to bring ips brands celebrities and more to embrace the idea of the metaverse to engage and make nfts nfts that are not just quick drops on marketplace but nft that will bring value to the owner of those and create more engagement to their community we believe nft is actually a medium that should be considered over a long time like how do i use nft and how do i use metaverse for my community for my fund to give them constantly value and to do that we brought gaming ips like atari rollercoaster tycoon square enix to name a few entertainment ips the last one we've

announced is a walking dead but we have also care bear the smurf and few others coming along music artists blondish deadmau5 ricciotin and more coming as well sports fashion so you can already see the diversity of all the experience that will be found into the metaverse we start with gaming but we're expanding it much beyond and finally and something i believe is also key to positioning sandbox as really an open nft metaverse is like we want to allow creators to make nft on sandbox possibly using them with our game maker to create experience on sandbox can also use them into older blockchain

and decentralized apps since we are using erc 721 and euro c1155 so any other developer could implement and add utility to um by the asset of sandbox but we're also working now to integrate existing nfts from the ecosystem and give them additional utility within sandbox so before that let me explain a little bit the idea is like if you own a crypto punk if you want a cryptokitty a maybe a more a board a an older avatar collection they are just 2d static images that we must most of us use as our twitter or social media profile picture

and that's it we are very proud of owning them they are unique but we don't have much utility behind what we want to enable is for anyone to be able to play and interact with our nft within a 3d virtual world and we're positioning sandbox as this virtual playground where you if you own a crypto punk you could get 3d representation as a game character already animated and that will look like the same and it's not a new token it's just through interprety bridge it's just a new representation of the same unique nft you own into your wallet and then you can use it to actually play and interact within social experience 3d virtual world at

sandbox this is also something unique is like how do we approach brands and why do brands also are interested to own uh by their land their logo on their land this is a walking dead i'm sure who's not familiar with walking dead in the audience all right oh whoa it's okay so i think like it's quite interesting and it adds a lot of interesting angle on like how well um players and creators are going to leverage the content the stories make their own additional episodes and so on from the original comic book how do we enable those brands to enter

sandbox essentially in three made faces the first phase is like indeed they have their logo on the map and we allow users to buy land around them so what it creates it creates this notion of neighborhood and community like if i'm an older landowner around me we own land next to a brand that we particularly like and want to engage with we are part of the same community we are going to potentially connect and create something together that goes beyond my own land that's something really strong and we are noticing it more specifically with

community of um nft holder like the board app for example the crypto packs owner etc we've seen that it goes also beyond metaverse but there's a lot of engagement around that the second phase of introducing brands and content in sandbox is allowing the brand and the user to acquire nft from those brands and use them to make their own stories and experiences so before the official i would say brand game so here walking that game comes out anyone can make its own game start publishing it allow others to experience it and potentially earn a revenue from it finally the last phase is like the

official game launch where users can interact and come in to play to run beyond the experiences and we've done that with walking dead care bears denmark smurf many more are coming i'll skip that i skip that as well i think now let's get into how we're really opening sandbox as an ecosystem and a part of that ecosystem how do we want the different nft holder and people who contribute to build that metaverse together with us to be successful and contribute to that success we are with the sandbox foundation we

are supporting already more than 50 game projects who can apply to our game maker fund at gamemakerfun.sandbox.game we are putting in place a dao where we are enabling users who own land who own sand to be involved into the governance of the virtual world and we're opening the marketplace for not only to curated artists but soon to any artist to sell their content so other studios older creators can buy it from them and use it this slide is already outdated as of today in less than three months all the artists who published content on the marketplace have sold for more than 1.3 million

which as of today should represent more than half a million dollars already earned by creators and they earn 95 revenue from the content they create before us it's really important to really every land owner every creator is actually a stakeholder in the success of the platform so we want to provide all the different content creation tools and all the different monetization system through by investigating season reward the marketplace the foundation support so that they can contribute and be incentivized to succeed that's important and we provide the foundation we provide

the game maker academy and various resource to make sure that they will be able to sell their content they will be able to create experience that engage users over a long time and make them succeed here we can see some examples of experiences that are part of the game maker fun it's important that we promote diversity as well as part of that metaverse so it could be rpg game action game adventure game exploration narration a cultural game as well based on some countries like here on this one like kowloon city in hong kong that's part of an experience built by a local team a game studio that

we've been supporting and we've been going really really uh further into supporting game studios so not just supporting game project as part of the game maker fun but also now supporting entrepreneur who are quitting their job some of them they spend 10 years at ubisoft gameloft other big game company and they want to start a new business focus on building games or building or creating content in sandbox and we are if you want to do that talk to us because basically we already have supporting five studios around the world this way supporting their p l their cost of resource and hiring so they can start creating

with less risk but a lot of upside by being the first pioneers in this space we believe there's room for many more content than games if you want to create like virtual concerts virtual shows clubs dj set even wedding parties or shopping streets housing parties a museum where you can exhibit crypto art or specific artist art gallery fashion show fashion in the metaverse is essential i'll talk a little bit more about that seasonal content casino games spectacles like cabaret theme parks or more content like talk show newscast streaming of content i'm sure there will be movies produced from virtual actors as avatars within

metaverse telling stories in a new representation as an example talk to us and one main question that i think many landowners and many people in the community are asking but all right now i got my land i've engaged into the metaverse what do i do next how am i going to monetize the content the experience how do i build that business that will be profitable and sustainable it's important it's one of the reasons we're trying to help you succeed we're going to do that essentially and allow landowner to monetize through three main way the simplest way is like you can sell

on the marketplace directly the nft the content that you made and that you included in your game to exhibit it but we think there's more there's more ways coming essentially from our experience and background gaming that we can enable landowners game creators and other entrepreneurs to succeed in the sandbox one of them is essentially combining these two systems one is called nft gating the vi the id that in order to enter into any land into any experience you might require a ticket that ticket will be obviously an nft but it doesn't need to be or look like a ticket

anything can be actually a ticket to enter into a land it could be a wearable like the hut here could be a t-shirt could be a sword could be a character etc could be your crypto punk so then starting from there like you can think of like all right i can make some part of my lens for free but accessible to anyone but i can also enable access and create special content special experiences um liveops only for the orders of that ticket that nft could then grow in value there will be a limited supply and the more you provide um fun engagement to the order of that ticket over time the more it will uh be

re people will want to it and it will grow it's also secondary market price and engage users but then you might ask me why would i want a ticket if i don't know yet what kind of rewards i'm going to engage for so the second system that will come along it is called a season reward pass for those of you who are players or have been in gaming you might be familiar with the concept of battle pass concept of battle pass is essentially like based on how much you're engaging and how much progression you have into certain games you will be able to claim all sorts of rewards and of course the most interesting rewards as nft or token will be at the highest tier

that's what we want to do we want to enable any landowner through by the game and the content they have to create a season that can last a few days to several weeks where they define and like depending on how much they engage with all the experience different tiers of reward so now we have on one side people who are ready to buy a ticket and the ticket to access potentially highly valuable reward for them that they can then keep collect or sell on the marketplace depending on the utility and their desires those are two key systems that we think will

initially will launch with our own play-to-run season towards the end of the summer but once we put these tools into the end of creators anyone can then create all those type of experiences i was referring into and start a lot of different businesses into the metaverse accessing monetization now that we have businesses who can access monetization we have landowners we have uh the different creation tools and we have already talked about uh how to play and interact i wanna go a bit deeper into like how we're pushing all sorts of jobs into the metaverse jobs that are part of

like this new digital economy around nfts and that i think like will be really skills if not full-time jobs for many of us within the next decade or more think about it like we're already spending a lot of time creating content uh on engaging on for social media developing for website developing for a technical platform so why doesn't into virtual world it wouldn't happen i split it here into five main categories but i'm sure there will be more and if you have any idea of more jobs feel free to to ping me and we'll complete this list together first of all all jobs that relates to

content creations so i've put here a few titles architects people who are going essentially to build the layout of the world whether it's exterior or interior design game designer people who are more focused not on the look and feel of the world but more adding like gamification the logic how do they create engagement how do they create stories etc fashion designers people who are essentially going to create a line of clauses for by the avatar since as we use avatar as our own identity we will want to customize the look and feel it will be essentially the main way

other people perceive us into virtual world virtual shows designer is another example like it's not just about gamifying your land making it beautiful but it's also making it like just like attending a concert if i go to a madonna concert i don't just go to see madonna i go to for the ambience for the community people there and for all the light shows fire etc fireworks etc around it let's move into player side can gamer be a job i think so i think so now like we accept that i can earn a revenue from it let me explain i play for one hour

in a game at the end of that i wire i earn a sword that's word is maybe worth one if i can sell it on the marketplace i just made one if an hour great that that's already something very powerful very new now let's say i buy on the marketplace and other golds world instead of that traditional sword and instead of earning one if i earn two if after that hour of gameplay wow even better like i just made a lot of profits on it then start an economy behind it and i don't know about yourself but i've grown in a culture where my family or these people who didn't really understand uh

video games they they always told me you know like this is non-serious stuff you're not going like you should stop and just study you'll it's not a job etc truth is like i'm spending for the past 10 years all my time creating game and earning revenue from game and now i want to push it further so like anyone who plays game can also enjoy have fun and potentially also make it his job if he wants to and nobody will question that anymore and as part of being a gamer we'll see different uh kind of categories like that point both resource collectors farmers we've seen that with many mmorpg game i'm thinking

of your world of warcraft as an example guild manager it's actually something goes beyond so rather than playing alone if you join a community if you join a guild you can actually optimize your earnings how they are going to teach you the good tips and tricks they will pull the resource for everyone and then split the resource collected optimizing the yield that's being generated by each individual of the guild i'm not making this up there are already companies decentralizing the space that are making this for living and impacting the life for thousands of people that company is called

yield guild gaming they are acquiring nft they are acquiring assets and training thousands of players in philippines argentina in us and canada so i encourage you to check out and see for yourself now let's talk about a discovery of content with our user generated content platform the metaverse at least sandbox metaverse has 166 464 lands that's quite a lot so i'm sure like you will not like to lose time not that time is precious it's money now if you start to think like that so you will trust others could be influencers could be curators to discover what content makes more sense for you

make recommendation and then optimize again your time and your yield as you participate and engage with this but not everything should necessarily need to be financially optimized so sometimes you might just want to be in the meta verse to explore to tour around and i'm thinking something like on airbnb airbnb used to be a platform where you just rent apartments from older peers now they are also providing like tour guides so they help you to visit different places monuments guided by locals and why not in the metaverse basically you can be guided by the creator or you can be guided by members of the community

who are different people than the creator but they know a lot of like what is this place what has happened at this time how this was made who is the artist who made this piece that's being exposed here how much time did you take etc so you can learn there's a lot of culture i think that's going to happen in the metaverse and people will leverage that going further let's talk a little bit about also commerce and transaction why are so many brands entering the metaverse right now they are essentially more to make sure that they are closer to that next generation of customers that spend more time into virtual world than they do watching youtube videos playing traditional video games or engaging on

social media and they are doing it with this idea in mind that they can sell to those customers physical goods and or virtual goods as well like virtual sneakers maybe some of you are familiar with artifact there's french studio producing a lot of very very cool things so check them out they they are pushing and they are really pushing cool stuff that can be done only virtually and could be um what's the best way to decide if you want to buy like some wearable some virtual sneakers and to see it in action on avatars on your peers and what if not being just like

good looking they were actually improving your skills makes you run twice faster and then also increasing your possibility to generate a revenue behind that's the thing that commerce so we could call it e-commerce or metaverse commerce i don't know if there's a word for it but that's i think it's exploding right now and all the big brands are already fighting to enter the space we're seeing every week a news about how nike gucci and older are also trying to enter meters and that's super exciting additionally to that that land virtual land is like virtual real estate digital real estate there are people

there are existing companies that are building like virtual land funds acquiring land in the central land in sandbox in crypto voxel pulling it and offering you to other share there are people who are a virtual real estate agent that they're helping to connect supply and demand find buyers for your parcel estimate the right value for the market and more let's go a little bit further community as well for me like it's not about just building a land and launching it it's all about like what's going to happen when someone enters you want that every person that enter into your land will always leave an experience and have something fun and engaging to do

at any point of time they enter and it's not always the case sometimes i'm entering a virtual world it's there's no one else it's boring like then i want to leave i don't want to come back think of think think of like walking in the conference in this room there's only one person watching me talking well you leave you will not stay here so that's this idea like you need people to animate the community from those experience in the virtual world and they can do all sorts of games all sort of activities that could also relate to coaching yoga music even why not dating etc in the mailbox and you know what many of

the nft ecosystem brand blockchain brand they understand that that's why as you can see on this map brands and community avatar community like board a superiority artifact rosso they used run ash masks and so more they already own land in sandbox and they are engaging their community to participate and be the first people that are actually having jobs in it i was mentioning you before like our goal is to allow anyone to play and interact with our characters so here's some overview of how we are turning into 3d playable characters some of them that's my punk that's not my ape i wish

we're building it using always again to this idea of decentralized and openness so we are building it using uh and putting all our smart contract open source they are accessible on github so you can fork them you can reuse them if you want you can help us improve them if you find anything i'll skip a little bit the technical part but uh free to to share and we are doing also it again back to into the tokenomics of a utt token of our platform by uh giving 50 back to the foundation so anytime someone spends send on our platform to acquire sand to acquire nfts earning a revenue from the content they sell or

people who participate into playing into their game we are making sure making sure that it goes back to the foundation to keep supporting creating more jobs bringing more talent into the metaverse we want to make that made average fully decentralized so there will be a roadmap for a governance implementation with a dow that progressively will be able to vote on the development roadmap on how we are managing the different pools for the reward how we are how project creator artists get to be paid and how we are going to manage the last land we keep into our reserve some of the features we are doing to support the artists so we are featuring content we are featuring collections

from both ip and creators and collective of creator as well that's how we'll drive sales we're enabling fashion on avatars so here are a little bit more details on how to create customized wearables it looks simple in voxel but it already offers a lot of customization behind see here i never thought people would be so creative launching collections of wearables and fashion in the middle here's another example of like virtual sneakers commerce into sandbox where those are actually equipment that increase the avatar speed and they were made as part of like a

collector series launched by atari here is how to build and showcase existing nft so you can create museums and galleries and again we provide a system the creator community has found ways to make it so much better than we initially fought by creating a lot of context and interior design around it and that's it for my presentation i think i still have a few minutes for q a thank you very much for the talk i have

a question regarding how you as a company manage the integration of nfts into your own game so let's say for instance that the cryptokitties community is really into the sandbox they want to have their nft into the game how is it going to play out do they reach out to you and you do the depth for them uh how does that play out right that's a great question i think any community that has an existing nft collection it usually comes from the community directly so they have either uh one of the community founders or key members who comes for example maybe it's dao it's a dao that approaches and they say we want to implement and have the interpretation bridge so

we we try to to implement using the existing tools we have so there's no smart contract involved at the moment to give that representation of the character or the nfts and make it follow the format of our game characters so they can be used into game maker and then their community can leverage those it's for now it's a lot of uh content production mostly more than technical world work but that's i think um something that can be easily uh crowdsourced to the community as well and that's that creates more job that creates revenue for them and also that engage their community

into participating into that content creation thanks a lot for the inspiring talk i had a question regarding adoption so how many monthly active users do you currently have and how have you seen it evolving maybe in the past year at sandbox so we have more than 250 000 monthly active users who are because we are platform they are engaging across several products the voxel editor the dashboard where they create their avatars they interact with the marketplace or the land sales the game maker as well just to give you a rough id people on average spend more than two hours a day on the game maker to create those

experiences and over the 250 000 users more than 40 percent have already created their 3d avatar meaning showing the importance of for them to have that identity customizing it and being ready to play afterwards and it's growing pretty fast like over the past six months more than 500 percent increase we grow 10 000 users a week at the moment and we think once we open the play site and landowner can open their own experience we'll see explosive growth i um asked vitalik yesterday about how

we could include kim kardashian in this community a little bit better and i'm feeling a little bit of pressure because it feels like there's some like kanye in one of his songs talks about the kimoji's and how they made a million a minute when they were like uh presented to the community so there's obvious a lot of influence there and i feel like if her closet can would there be a way because vitalik will only support it if there's some some public good to be done with about it if she were to like have her fashion uh sense put into this like digital sandbox is there a way to make it uh for public good um i don't know if that's going to answer your question but

if landowners and the entrepreneur of the medallions do not make it themselves for public good we have already taken some initiative ourselves so we announced about the months ago that we will be moving to matic polygon as a layer two and we compensated already all the carbon credits by buying carbon offset on two platform blockchain based fully transparent nori and of cetera and we also are giving one percent of any land process sale proceed to charities that are actually growing forest not just planting trees but actually working to make the environment fertile again we also have been supporting

i skipped that slide before but i can show it quickly [Music] here sorry one of the top three most expensive land sales we did we gave it 100 to unicef foundation and we're going to continue running this kind of operation which we think will benefit public good and specific communities more to encourage them and give them more fur chances as well to be part in the metaverse potentially one day awesome thank you thanks for the talk um do you protect yourself from land owners which are inactive and land owners who are producing

manage content i can repeat the question because it was a bit um not so loud so yes do you have mechanisms that protect you from land owners which are inactive and land owners who would produce content which is not um in line with your ethics or with the um i would say the good being of the community all right so there's two parts to this question the first part is about like creative the right incentive and making sure that there's always a good motivation to actually publish content fun experiences so we want to promote obviously the

creators who are doing great content on their land and we want to do that by using the foundation to incentivize so if you publish an experience before a certain deadline onto your land you might receive much more by revenue stream from users we might not take our royalties on top of it we can support and top by the play toward pool to add extra incentive to bring users and to reward you we also through our creation tools game maker we want to make it so imagine you're not a great game creator and you don't want to hire someone to build it for you you should still be able to in one click to deploy an almost ready-made experience where you just have to change

a few things and it's already made yours those are called templates and there will be dozens of templates for running all these kind of experiences i was showing before um that's also there's other engagement like game jam etc that will be in place now um there are also other way to monetize your land just rent it someone else will do better things and you still earn a revenue from it i think that's definitely a good incentive to the second part of your question we have uh moderation in place and term of use there's an indeed thing that should not be permitted even into an open metaverse but we will not be the

only one to decide and police it that else we would fall back into centralization and what other platforms are making so there will be the dao and the governance people can report things they think are inappropriate there will be a creation creation system in place where the dao will review and decide if that report is indeed correct or not and take action from there take action meaning not removing you keep all the ownership of your content but not making it accessible without on the platform thank you for your question all of you

we shot about the time so feel free to to go to meet sebastian if you got any questions thank you everyone you