Sandbox or migration to Ronin, the destiny of the two veteran projects of Metaverse and GameFi woven together?

Combining Destiny Deciding Between Sandbox and Migration to Ronin - The Fate of Two Veteran Projects in Metaverse and GameFi

Can the hot RON save the weak SAND?

By: Loopy Lu

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

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According to Coingecko, the RON token has hit a new high for the year, currently trading at $1.79 with a 24-hour increase of around 18%.

Yesterday, rumors about Ronin and The Sandbox started circulating in the market. As a well-established metaverse project, The Sandbox seems to be planning to migrate to the Ronin chain. Although this news has not been officially announced, it has still caught people’s attention.

Ronin unveils SAND, sparking speculation

Recently, an old on-chain information suddenly surfaced in the community. On-chain information shows that a mysterious address has deployed SAND tokens on the Ronin testnet and conducted multiple transfers.

Following this clue on the browser, we can discover that the wallet initiating the SAND transfer is ronin:eb6d18bc9d2c80308e6224de78062453364cec1d. And this wallet with the ending ec1d is where the RON tokens in the wallet ultimately came from a Ronin network address with the domain name Seb.ron.

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

Although the identity of the Seb.ron address cannot be confirmed, many community members have speculated that it belongs to Sebastian Borget, co-founder and CEO of The Sandbox.

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

With positive news coming out frequently, can it save the SAND token?

Although this news has not been confirmed yet, it has still sparked speculation within the community. If The Sandbox really moves to Ronin, what kind of impact will it have on these two projects?

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 richer gameplay possibilities to users, including puzzles, resource management, loot, and various game types. Additionally, the new version introduces features such as NFT access control.

For players, the new version also includes several improvements to the game’s 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 also achieved great success in terms of partnerships recently, with multiple collaborations achieved in just the past month. Since November, The Sandbox’s new partnerships include:

• A collaboration with the Korea Creative Content Agency to host a pop-up store featuring a three-dimensional metaverse model based on the TV series “Strange Lawyer Yoo In Young.”

• The launch of a new virtual community called “Cinerama,” which includes Hollywood brands such as “The Walking Dead,” “Black Mirror,” “Peaky Blinders,” and “Cheech and Chong.”

• The luxury brand Gucci joining The Sandbox and launching the Gucci Cosmos Land experience.

• Aave’s NFT game, Aavegotchi, announcing a collaboration with The Sandbox to release a new game called “Ripples of the Gotchiverse.”

• The French fashion brand Lacoste announcing a strategic partnership with The Sandbox, where the teams will collaborate to create Lacoste World Tour.

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

But with all these frequent actions, is there any reflection in The Sandbox’s market value?

SAND token price trend in the past year Source: CoinGecko

In the short term, SAND token has been performing strongly in recent days, seemingly putting an end to the decline it experienced throughout the year. However, it is important to note that the entire crypto market has been performing well lately, and token prices have been rising across the board. If we consider BTC as the reference, the downtrend of SAND tokens might not be over yet.

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

Currently, the price performance of SAND tokens is not outstanding, and it can even be described as mediocre. If, as speculated by the community, The Sandbox is able to migrate to the Ronin chain, it may bring new lifeblood to The Sandbox.

The Rise of Ronin

While The Sandbox has not performed well, Ronin has emerged strongly in the recent GameFi craze.

In mid-October, the 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.

At the end of October, the Shillin hard fork was completed. This version implemented Optimistic Fast Finality (REP-0003) and REP-0002 protocol improvements. REP-0003 proposed a new mechanism for fast finality to improve transaction confirmation speed on Ronin. REP-0002 described the process of moving the Bridge to Ronin as a separate application, allowing the Bridge to be operated by its own set of operators without the need for validators.

In this hard fork, Ronin introduced a voting process to accelerate 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 token price have achieved remarkable performances.

Let’s start with the businesses outside of gaming. In mid-November, the Ronin Name Service (RNS) started its public sale. In early December, the Ronin network introduced the DeFi protocol Impossible Finance, which will deploy LaunchLianGuaid on the Ronin network. Products launched on this LaunchLianGuaid may require the use of tokens such as RON, AXS, and IDIA for staking and allocation.

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

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

Coingecko data shows that RON has achieved significant gains whether in USD or BTC terms.

And if we extend the time frame 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 with all the good news surrounding RON, how does it relate to The Sandbox, and can it drive the recovery of The Sandbox?

Is Polygon’s migration a way of escape? Is migration the cure?

The recent rise of the RON token, in addition to positive stimuli and the resurgence of the GameFi sector, can also be attributed to the performance of on-chain data.

In recent months, migration to the Ronin network has become a trend, with several games officially announcing their plans to migrate.

In early November of this year, 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 migrated to Ronin. The team behind it expresses their confidence in Ronin’s performance in the gaming industry and states that “Ronin Network is a network designed specifically for games.”

Not only migrations, but some new games have 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 partnership will introduce 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 be launched globally in the first quarter of 2024.

And some games that migrated earlier have already announced their recent data performance.

At the end of October, the pixel-focused P2E MMO game Pixels migrated to the Ronin Network. In previous news, Pixels had completed a $2.4 million seed round of financing, led by Animoca Brands and PKO Investments. The product was previously deployed on the Polygon network. In mid-November, Jeff Zirlin, co-founder of Ronin and Axie Infinity, posted on the X platform that the daily active address count for Pixels had exceeded 100,000.

A remarkable coincidence is that the games mentioned earlier that migrated are almost all originally located in the Polygon network, and The Sandbox is precisely the flagship metaverse product of the Polygon network.

Source: The Sandbox documentation

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

For The Sandbox, a game that was originally deployed on Ethereum, it has already undergone a migration to Polygon. Will the story of “Mencius Mother’s Three Moves” be staged in The Sandbox?

DeFiLlama data shows that the TVL of the Ronin chain is currently $124 million, a new high for the year.

It is difficult for us to determine whether more game migrations have brought more users to Ronin, or the prosperity of the Ronin ecosystem has attracted more projects. Although causality cannot be determined, the current phenomenon is evident-Ronin took off earlier in this GameFi hype.

If the migration really unfolds as speculated by the community, can the Ronin ecosystem once again save The Sandbox, which has performed weakly in this round of hype?

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