Animoca Brands and its subsidiary Bacasable Global, which operates the Metaverse platform
Animoca Brands and its subsidiary Bacasable Global, which operates the popular metaverse platform The Sandbox, have raised $20 million in convertible promissory notes valued at $1 billion.
Investors can convert notes into shares
Kingsway Capital led the funding round and included LG Tech Ventures and True Global Ventures. Holders of promissory notes will be able to convert them into Bacasable Global shares under the same conditions as their existing preferred shares.
The latest funding round, valued at $1 billion, comes nearly two years after The Sandbox planned to raise $400 million at a valuation of $4 billion.
In its official announcement, The Sandbox said that the latest funding round will be used to grow the creator economy and that the decentralized mobile metaverse platform is expected to launch in 2025.
Among its most notable uses, the Sandbox is intended to add new social features and avatar skills, as well as to upgrade the 3D editing tools of Game Maker and VoxEdit.
The Metaverse has promised to improve gameplay options with a new multiplayer rules system, which is expected to go live in beta later in 2024 before its general release in 2025.
Sandbox Sees Significant Growth Despite Bearish Sentiment
Since the alpha launch of The Sandbox in November 2023, more than 1,000 user-generated experiences have been developed. The platform has 5.7 million user accounts linked to cryptocurrency wallets.
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Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, said that many popular games, such as Minecraft and Roblox, which are used by millions of users daily, do not offer digital property rights to their users. He added that Sandbox represents “the evolution of the user-generated content game in the age of digital ownership.”
Investment management firm McKinsey & Company expects the metaverse economy to reach $5 trillion by 2030. However, despite the initial hype around the concept that led Facebook to undertake an overhaul full brand, the metaverse pivot failed to attract users after the bull run. The $1.2 billion Metaverse project had just 38 daily users in 2022, according to a Futurism report.
As major Metaverse projects struggle to gain traction after the 2022-2023 bear market, The Sandbox reports the addition of over 330,000 unique creators who have downloaded no-code Game Maker in The Sandbox over the past 12 month.
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