Should we go to the Sandbox or jump on the hot trend of Ronin? Should we go both ways or cling on to the thigh?

Should We Choose the Sandbox or Jump on the Ronin Bandwagon? Merge or Stick to Tradition?

Author: Loopy Lu, Odaily Star Daily

In recent times, the GameFi sector has seen a resurgence. As a former star project in the GameFi domain, Ronin has been making frequent moves in the past few months.

According to Coingecko, the RON token has reached a new high for the year, with a current price of $1.79 and a 24-hour increase of approximately 18%.

Yesterday, rumors about Ronin and The Sandbox started circulating in the market. As a veteran metaverse project, The Sandbox seems to be planning a move to the Ronin chain. Although this news has not been officially announced, it has still sparked people’s interest in these two projects.

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Ronin Surprises with SAND Speculations

Recently, an old piece of information on the blockchain suddenly resurfaced. The blockchain information shows that a mysterious address has deployed SAND tokens on the Ronin testnet and has conducted several transfers.

Following this clue through the browser, we can discover that the wallet initiating the SAND transfer is ronin:eb6d18bc9d2c80308e6224de78062453364cec1d. And the RON tokens in this wallet ultimately come from a domain named Seb.ron on the Ronin network.

It should be noted that there is currently no concrete evidence that the Seb.ron address belongs to official personnel of The Sandbox.

Although the identity of the Seb.ron address is yet to be confirmed, many community members have speculated that it belongs to Sebastian Borget, co-founder and CEO of The Sandbox.

This move may indicate that The Sandbox is about to migrate to Ronin.

Positive news keeps coming, can it save the SAND token?

Although this news has not been confirmed yet, it has still sparked the community’s imagination. If The Sandbox is really going to move to Ronin, what kind of impact will it have on these two products?

Recently, The Sandbox has been making frequent moves. Just this morning, The Sandbox updated its Game Maker version and released the latest 0.9 version. In this version, it provides creators with more tools and creative space.

The new version brings more possibilities for rich gameplay, including puzzles, resource management, and loot, among other game types. Additionally, the new version also introduces features such as NFT access control.

For players, the new version also introduces several improvements to game strategy, and new tools like collision correctors and rendering range limiters can help creators optimize the gaming experience.

In addition to the version update, The Sandbox has recently achieved great success in terms of partnerships, with multiple collaborations in just the past month. Since November, The Sandbox’s new collaborations include:

• A collaboration with the Korea Creative Content Agency to host a pop-up store featuring a stereoscopic model of the TV series “Strange Lawyer Yoo Young-yoo” in the metaverse.
• The launch of a new virtual community called “Cinerama,” which includes popular Hollywood brands like “The Walking Dead,” “Black Mirror,” “Peaky Blinders,” and “Cheech and Chong.”
• Luxury brand Gucci joining The Sandbox and introducing the Gucci Cosmos Land experience.
• Aavegotchi, an NFT game in the Aave ecosystem, announcing a collaboration with The Sandbox to release the new game “Ripples of the Gotchiverse.”
• French clothing brand Lacoste announcing a strategic partnership with The Sandbox, with the Sandbox team collaborating to create Lacoste World Tour.

In early November, The Sandbox also announced the upcoming launch of an ecological fund. By 2024, The Sandbox plans to launch the Game Maker fund with 100 million SAND tokens. The fund will be based on a DAO selection system, which will not only reward creators and content but also reward their engagement within the platform.

But with such frequent moves, does it reflect in The Sandbox’s market value?

SAND token price trend in the past year Source: CoinGecko

In the short term, SAND token has surged in recent days, seemingly ending the year-long decline. However, it is important to note that the overall cryptocurrency market has been performing well recently, with token prices increasing across the board. When we use BTC as a reference, the downward trend of SAND token may not have ended yet.

SAND/BTC price trend in the past year Source: CoinGecko

Currently, the performance of SAND token’s price is not outstanding; it can even be described as mediocre. If The Sandbox does indeed migrate to the Ronin chain, as speculated by the community, it might bring new lifeblood to The Sandbox.

Ronin’s Rising Popularity

Despite The Sandbox’s underperformance, Ronin has experienced a surge in the recent GameFi trend.

In mid-October, Ronin Network announced the launch of the Lucas (v2.6.2) upgrade and the Shillin hard fork on the Ronin Mainnet, and recommended users running validators or RPC nodes on the Mainnet to upgrade to the Lucas version.

By the end of October, the Shillin hard fork was completed. This version implemented Optimistic Fast Finality (REP-0003) and multiple protocol improvements in REP-0002. REP-0003 proposed a new mechanism for fast finality, aimed at improving the speed of transaction confirmation on Ronin. REP-0002 describes the process of moving the Bridge to Ronin as a standalone application, which will allow the Bridge to be operated by its own set of operators without the need for validators to run it.

With this hard fork, Ronin introduced a voting process to speed up block finalization. The finalization time of a block has been reduced from 45 seconds to 6 seconds.

After this upgrade, Ronin’s ecosystem development and coin price have shown impressive performance.

Let’s start with the business outside of gaming. In mid-November, Ronin Name Service (RNS) started its public sale. In early December, the DeFi protocol Impossible Finance was introduced to the Ronin Network, and it will deploy LaunchLianGuaid on the Ronin Network. The products released on this LaunchLianGuaid may require the use of tokens such as RON, AXS, and IDIA for staking and distribution.

Similarly, the collaboration between Ronin Wallet and Binance LianGuaiy was announced a few days ago, and the “Deposit from Binance” feature has been integrated into the Ronin Wallet mobile app. This means that users can convert assets held on Binance to on-chain assets on Ronin, such as converting BTC, ETH, and other tokens to AXS, SLP, and USDC on Ronin.

With all these positive developments, the RON token has performed well.

According to Coingecko data, RON has achieved good gains in both USD and BTC.

And if we extend the timeline to this year, RON has already reached a new high for the year, with the current price of $1.79 surpassing the previous high of $1.42 set in April.

But what is the connection between these positive factors for RON and The Sandbox? Can it drive the recovery of The Sandbox?

Polygon Exodus? Is migration the solution?

The recent rise of the RON token is not only due to positive stimuli and the resurgence of the GameFi sector but also the performance of on-chain data.

In recent months, migrating to the Ronin Network seems to have become a trend, with several games officially announcing this plan.

In early November, Ronin developer Sky Mavis partnered with South Korean game developer ACT Games to bring all of ACT’s games to the Ronin Network.

Zoids Wild Arena TCG, which is still in the testing phase, was initially deployed on Polygon but has now been migrated to Ronin. The team stated that they are optimistic about Ronin’s performance in the gaming sector and said, “Ronin Network is a network designed specifically for games.”

Not only migration, but some new games also announced their future deployment on Ronin.

On the 6th of this month, Ronin also announced a partnership with Singapore game developer Foonie Magus. This collaboration will bring the company’s new game “Apeiron” to the Ronin blockchain. The demo version of Apeiron is already available on the Epic Game Store, and the mobile version is expected to launch globally in the first quarter of 2024.

Meanwhile, some games that migrated earlier have announced their recent data performance.

At the end of October, the P2E MMO game Pixels, which focuses on the metaverse, migrated to the Ronin Network. Previously, Pixels had completed a $2.4 million seed funding round with Animoca Brands and PKO Investments leading the investment. The product was previously deployed on the Polygon network. In mid-November, Ronin and Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin wrote on the X platform that Pixels’ daily active addresses had exceeded 100,000.

An interesting coincidence is that most of these migrated games, as mentioned earlier, were originally on the Polygon network, and The Sandbox happens to be a leading metaverse product on the Polygon network.

Source: The Sandbox Documentation

It needs to be emphasized again that the current migration of The Sandbox is only a community speculation and discussion. But the exodus of Polygon games is indeed happening more than once.

For The Sandbox, this game that was originally deployed on Ethereum has already undergone a migration to Polygon. Will the story of “Meng Mu San Qian” be staged again in The Sandbox?

According to DeFiLlama data, the TVL of the Ronin chain is currently $124 million, reaching a new high for the year.

It is difficult for us to determine whether more game migrations have brought more users to Ronin, or if the prosperity of the Ronin ecosystem has attracted more projects. Although the causal relationship cannot be determined, the current phenomenon is obvious – Ronin took off early in this GameFi boom.

If the migration does happen as the community speculates, can the Ronin ecosystem once again save The Sandbox, which has shown weak performance in this round of hype?

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