Full transcript: Sebastien Borget on London Real
2:47 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Sébastien Borget, the entrepreneur, technologist and blockchain gaming pioneer. You are the co-founder and CEO of The Sandbox, the decentralized virtual gaming world where players can build, own and monetize their experiences on virtual land through the use of NFTs. You have over 13 years of experience in growing startups and developing mobile games that have been downloaded millions of times all over the world.
3:14 You were also named in the top 100 most influential people in crypto by Cointelegraph and have committed yourself to building an open metaverse that enables users to truly own their identity. The Sandbox has generated over 144 million dollars in gross merchandise value to date, with over 1.6 million registered users. I’m one of them. Over 165 brands, including Adidas, Snoop Dogg and The Walking Dead, have created versions of their worlds and characters in your metaverse.
3:41 Brian Rose: Sébastien, welcome to London Real.
3:43 Sébastien Borget: Thank you.
3:44 Brian Rose: It’s great to have you here. I can’t wait to jump in and talk about metaverse and maybe we’ll start right there, because six months ago I really didn’t understand the metaverse very well. I was lucky to have a call with Yat Siu of Animoca Brands, who I know has been partnering with you for, you know, a lot many, many years, and he started to explain metaverse, but maybe you can help explain it further to me and my users.
4:12 You know, when I was talking to Yat, we were on a live video call and he said, “Brian, this is the metaverse. If you think about it, we’re having a digital experience with each other, and a lot of people don’t understand that they actually are in the metaverse in many ways.” We’re thinking about how that evolves, and I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on that. And also, my mom is 78 years old. She lives in California, and she doesn’t understand the metaverse.
4:37 Yeah, say hi. Maybe you can explain it to her. I will say Sébastien that she does have a hot wallet. She does have some crypto and some stable coins, so that’s a start, but how do you start that explanation of kind of what is the metaverse to the normal everyday person?
4:54 Sébastien Borget: All right.
4:55 So, putting in simple terms, what’s the metaverse? It’s this myriad of virtual worlds and digital universes that you can access through an avatar. That avatar is a 3D representation of yourself, so you can engage through more social, more rich, more immersive experiences. Virtual worlds have been existing for more than 25 years already. We’ve seen that before, but what’s new, what’s different, is that that avatar that you own, you can transfer it from one virtual world to another.
5:28 You keep the same identity across all those they are traveled. You keep the same digital good, digital asset, virtual land and currency across them, which is currently not the case with Second Life, Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, Meta and the likes. And that’s what makes, in my opinion, the metaverse truly a metaverse. It is open. It lets its users own their identity, their currency, their tokens.
5:58 And this is achieved, and that’s the novelty, through a technology that is blockchain and NFTs. And I think, like, what can you see in terms of experience in the metaverse? You’re going to see a little bit of all the activities you already see in the real world: social clubs, virtual concerts, shows, games, places where you can discover art galleries, museums, so much more. And you’re going to see way more fun, way more engaging things that come out of anyone’s imagination, beyond laws of physics and more.
6:41 Wow. All right, that’s a pretty good explanation. And, like you said, we’ve seen metaverses before, like you mentioned, things like Minecraft, and you know, I played Grand Theft Auto back in the day, which, you know, has strange parallels to The Sandbox, because there’s a map, I think. I remember there being a map of LA and I had a character who could create assets, you know, and buy things and steal things, and but it was always enclosed in that closed metaverse, right?
7:11 I don’t… I didn’t bring my character with me. I didn’t get any of that value. And is that the big distinction between what you’re building in the open metaverse and these previous closed metaverses?
7:24 Sébastien Borget: I do think so.
7:25 Like what you’ve seen before, they are games. Their virtual worlds are best, but they are not metaverses. Like, you do not own the content. You do not own your identity. Your time and contribution is not valued as you participate in building this world as a creator or spending time in this world as a user.
7:44 And that’s because everything is actually stored in a closed ecosystem or platform by one company that operates it, and that company is actually capturing all the value that is being generated by the activities and the creation and the content of that world for itself, rather than distributing it back to the users who make that world exist, alive and thrive. So that’s, in my opinion, really the difference. We’re seeing today why we’re entering this new realm of America, and what it enables.
8:19 Behind it’s well, it’s just monumental. It enables a whole digital economy where assets can have value and be transferred across worlds, and the creation of services on top of those assets, which leads to jobs and more.
8:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, and I want to talk about some of the job creation and income generation with play to earn models on the blockchain. I mean, it’s been pretty incredible the last couple of years. You know, you mentioned the fact that, as humans, I guess we always grew up by giving away our information and our digital identities kind of for free.
8:55 I think Yat Siu called it digital colonialism. The companies took our data, and now they sell it back to us in many ways, shapes and forms, and we never took ownership of it. It’s almost like we never recognized, as humans, that it was our right to have that information. I’m sure I’ve got countless avatars back on my Atari games and Castle Wolfenstein on my Apple II Plus, and all these things, even my Facebook account, right, that has my identity and information, but I’ll never own it or extract value from that.
9:26 Do you think part of this is a paradigm shift where you have to educate humans that we actually deserve to own our own value and information, and we should have the right to take this with us and move this around to different places?
9:40 Sébastien Borget: I think so. I do think, like, it’s not because we didn’t fault it was an issue before, or we didn’t even think it was possible because technology did not allow it before, that we should be happy with that situation. Let me take a concrete example.
9:54 If I buy this pen in a store and I can only use this pen at the store I bought it, that’s nonsense. Why should I not be able to use this pen on any piece of paper anywhere, at home, at school, etc.? Well, that’s how limited technology was before. You could only use the digital asset that you spent real money on in the places, games, platforms where you acquired them, and you, the operator of those platforms, the developer, were restricting the possibility of users to exchange them with each other, sell them on marketplaces, or even further, because they want to lock value and lock the user in.
10:34 That’s how their business model has been designed, to let their users go somewhere else. Now imagine growing up free. Growing up like this, anything I described is not possible. You can take your identity, your asset, anywhere else, sell them, etc. How in the world would you go back to a place where you can’t do that?
10:58 You feel like, oh, and now you’re taking out my rights to do so? And that’s why I think the world is going ultimately toward Web3, and anyone who is born with Web3 in 10 years, no way they’re going to go back into Web2. Also, there’s a whole business model in Web2. You said, like, companies collect my data and use that data to sell to advertisers, so they try to promote me more applications, more apps to download or products to buy, etc. It’s a very, it’s a way to think about the web in a very transactional manner.
11:35 First of all, so it’s not great in terms of user experience. We just try to optimize for people to buy or consume, whether people have experience, socialize, have fun, connect better. So we lost a bit of that essence, but it became really worse, typically for game developers who are essentially implementing ads. Developers just hate implementing all the solutions, SDKs, etc. Users hate ads.
12:02 They don’t like to spend time or watch them. Still, that was the only model that helped developers to monetize when users didn’t spend the one to three percent conversion on in-app purchases, and how is it possible? Is it possible because they, the developers, allowed companies like Facebook and Google to collect the data from their users, so they can then target them and sell back to the developer through advertising, the possibility for them to target users and bring users to their business model?
12:36 So even at the end of the day, developers, they think they were earning 70 percent of the revenue they generate, but if they spend 50 or 80 percent back into user acquisition to get new users, they are left with very little. So in the end, nobody wins. Nobody is really happy about that model, but because it was the only available, nobody really complained. I think again, we can do much better, and that’s what Web3 is, which is more user-centric and community driven, which is rewarding users for the values they bring into a network at all the levels, from the layer one protocol to the dApps protocol now.
13:16 And in the metaverse, even more specifically, we’re building something much more better, where the incentives are aligned across all parties by sharing it through the right orders.
13:28 Brian Rose: Yeah, and you make a great point, Sébastien. It actually changes the whole experience for someone when they then come online, because we’re all now so conditioned, right, to being sold to and converted by, you know, four major companies that create marketplaces and take 30 to 40 to 50 percent out of each trade.
13:49 Um, you know, maybe I’m talking about YouTube and Google and Facebook and Amazon, who again have created these amazing companies, but they’re the middlemen on all these transactions, and they take a big chunk out, which, you’re right, turns us into consumers, and the whole mentality is a consumption mentality, and it’s never optimized for, like you said, fun and experience, and then value creation and peer-to-peer transactions. So it’s, and again, we kind of see this with crypto assets, this massive growth, which some call between 60 to 120 percent year on year, is enabled, many say, because of this peer-to-peer sharing of value and partaking in the value of the ultimate network. So it’s kind of exciting to see.
14:34 I mean, this really feels like a revolution in gaming, and something that’ll actually change gaming itself because of the business model. Is that what you see as well?
14:47 Sébastien Borget: I think, essentially, it is exactly what I’m saying. I’m seeing much deeper connections between the creator of content and their fans. So I will never talk about client or consumer in the metaverse.
15:02 I think that term is really wrong. It’s already thinking into a mindset where you want to sell something to someone. There’s a better relation between brands and fans, or creators and their fans, thanks to the metaverse and thanks to NFTs that bring community of holders together into a space where they can be more creative, they can exchange their culture, their lifetime, they can bond through the ownership of the common asset. And we’re going back to the idea of what the web was originally meant to be, a place where you meet new people and you make new interesting connections, and you no longer value just having millions and millions of followers who are just passively watching or liking, but you have a few hundred, a few thousand people highly engaged, who are creatively contributing with you and everyone who contributes to that growth of your network, to that value, to that exchange, to this form of experience as being part of a community, specifically in a metaverse one.
16:11 Everyone is fairly rewarded for that. And to be more precise when I say fairly, actually creators who put content for sale, they get back 100% of the value of the content they sell. That’s how it should be.
16:25 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s such a new concept, and it’s one that we already see people are grabbing on to. You know, I have an academy and we teach, you know, DeFi in the academy, but I’ve also taught people how to build businesses and brands.
16:41 And you know, Sébastien, there’s a famous article on the web that was written by Kevin Kelly called “Your 1,000 True Fans.” It was that, you probably know it, it was this concept of the long tail the internet brought. He basically said you don’t need a million fans, you just need a thousand. I had someone on the other day that said, “Brian, with the metaverse you need a hundred,” with NFTs, and so focus on adding great value to a few people, make the connection, deliver value, and you don’t have to rack up millions and millions of passive fans.
17:12 You can have real connection, add real value, and then you know, take all the value for yourself to create more things. And yeah, it’s an incredible concept, and I never thought I would be saying a hundred true fans, but is it getting closer to a hundred than a thousand so far in Web3, given the size of, well, the overall number of wallets?
17:35 Sébastien Borget: It is that side of committee. Ultimately I feel like community will be in the region of a hundred or a thousand, and it’s going to be large enough, because it’s so much engagement, so much already connection with fans and creators than trying to aim again for many million followers but not actively engaged people.
17:57 Also digital scarcity enables that When you think about most of the NFT projects, they are all scaled at 10,000 collections, 10,000 unique NFTs that you can own and makes you a member of a club. Sometimes I like to think like the Bored Ape, you know, club. The Crypto Bank is a club, and what entitles you is not just owning the digital asset. It’s the experience, the creativity and many more perks and benefits. Now that happens both in metaverse and into a physical world and maybe the web.
18:33 I was referring to myriad of virtual worlds for the metaverse. Now I’m also thinking it’s a myriad of communities, with some overlapping through ownership for common joint ownership of NFTs. That’s, we’re going to explore, and we’re exploring, discover and connect in this paradigm.
18:51 Brian Rose: And I want to jump into The Sandbox. I know there’s ten thousand Doggies that are coming out, I think next week from Snoop Dogg, and that’s gonna be interesting to see how those NFTs are played, maybe as avatars inside The Sandbox, and I wanna get to this because you have a virtual world, literally 166,000 plus parcels of real estate that I think are 96 meters by 96 meters.
19:16 Maybe you can correct me, and then You’re literally creating communities and neighborhoods, which I guess is the way we always formed communities back in the hunter-gatherer days, so there’s a very interesting parallel. Before we get into The Sandbox, can you just tell me, while we’re here, what you think of the closed metaverse, a la Facebook Meta, versus what you’re creating as the open metaverse, just so people can see the differences. And I guess while I’m there, maybe you can talk about what you call the true metaverse, as in a company like The Sandbox, that metaverse is in your DNA.
19:49 You’re not bolting this on as an experience to a retail brand or an auto brand or a sports team brand. This is literally what you guys do. Maybe you can just speak on both of those points.
20:02 Sébastien Borget: Okay, so first of all, about the Doggies, great to mention it, and actually we will be one of the first collection that comes out, not just as a 2D profile picture but as a 3D character, already animated, comes with 70 actions and more: dance, jump, fight, run, kill, many more based on Snoop, Snoop Dogg, which is like this hip-hop legend that performed at Super Bowl just last weekend Each one of them is unique, and it’s really usable in a metaverse as your 3D character.
20:35 That was very important for us to add the immediate utility. That’s something you do not usually see anywhere else While we’re there, it’s immediately available in The Sandbox, and then potentially other meta That’s what the technology enables. So in The Sandbox you will be able to play it in the right, in the next alpha season coming around, beginning of March. Announcement coming really soon, and and others, as soon as they can support it, because they can read the user wallet, your ownership, and give you utility for that, right?
21:10 Brian Rose: And Snoop Dogg has built a mansion in The Sandbox that mimics his real-life mansion in LA. I believe some people have paid a lot of money for the land around his mansion, and now it sounds like you’re taking to the next level with these NFT Doggies that are 3D with all sorts of actions that you can then move out of the metaverse. I mean, this is everything you’ve been talking about, that’s now happening.
21:37 Sébastien Borget: Exactly, like Snoop Dogg is at the forefront of showcasing the ut of NFT interoperability.
21:43 And we think it’s a great to have that, like a mainstream hip-hop idol showcase that, in non-technological ways, to his fans and the broader community.
21:54 Brian Rose: Did you watch? Maybe, okay, go ahead. Go ahead.
21:58 Sébastien Borget: Yes, of course I watched his performance.
22:01 Brian Rose: Of course, was he the best?
22:03 Sébastien Borget: Well, he was the best at that. I think, yeah, I think his story will show us that he just went one level higher in terms of lifestyle culture and what hip-hop represents for the U.S. and for the rest of the world.
22:17 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s a tremendous partnership for you to have Snoop Dogg in The Sandbox. I mean, again, your timing is amazing, obviously the Super Bowl’s there.
22:27 He’s become such a global brand. I used to listen to Snoop when he had a song called Murder Was the Case that they made me, and then I come home from work and my four-year-old sons are watching him on a science program. I mean, Snoop has become this incredible, ultimate global brand that somehow fits into everyone’s world He cooks with Martha Stewart, and now he’s on The Sandbox, and you’ve got Doggies coming out. So yeah, it’s very exciting
22:53 Sébastien Borget: Talking about the song, I think one of the songs in the new album he released is actually called The House I Built.
23:00 Listen to the lyrics, you will, I’m sure you’ll love it. The Sandbox references in there Yes, you will hear Snoop say “Welcome to The Sandbox,” you will call and we’ll say, how much is my house world worth in the middle verse. It’s great, like, it became a culture phenomenon like from a male verse into a song, into a 3D avatar and more. That’s how it should be. Your life is like a video game.
23:26 Brian Rose: Somehow, Sébastien, you’re like, it’s like a movie It’s all happening, right?
23:32 Sébastien Borget: Everything is, I think, like, everything is a game in life.
23:37 Brian Rose: Yeah, I’m starting to understand that Is Snoop Dogg even cooler in real life than what we see on the videos? What’s he like?
23:46 Sébastien Borget: I am, I hope to see him soon in person.
23:49 Yes, but he’s smart. One thing I And so that’s a good transition to answer the second part of your question, which is like How is Facebook Meta, like, proposing something in terms of metaverse versus what we’re building? But I think this analogy with the Snoop Dogg Doggies, etc., is great. It’s a great example of what you can’t do in Meta. Like you still cannot take your avatar anywhere else, your digital asset anywhere else.
24:24 You cannot even choose your identity as an avatar. When you start in Facebook, you just still start by picking your first name, your last name, an email address, so you’re still being very much defined by who you are in the real world rather than having the chance to pick your identity, and I haven’t seen anything so far that excites me very much And that should be our role. Like, if we want to propose something new to people about what the metaverse is bringing that we haven’t seen yet.
24:57 The first thing to show, like, let’s show it’s fun. Let’s show it, bring culture that show it’s connecting us in a different way. And well, my opinion is, all the videos of those VR experiences a bit of game, a bit of work, a bit of training. I didn’t feel it was 2022.
25:17 Brian Rose: Yeah, well, it looked like, like 10 years ago, 20 years ago, just like an like an old corporate video version of what the metaverse would be.
25:27 It wasn’t fun, is what you’re trying to say?
25:30 Sébastien Borget: It wasn’t fun, and even worse, like Mark used very specific words again. Like, he insisted about, like, customers, clients, trying to sell product for brands and retail And I understand, like, the mail address is a business opportunity for many brands, but I want also to highlight that it should not be just a way for brands to try to sell a product more. That shouldn’t be the ultimate end goal here. Like, the end goal is to be closer to the people who like your brand and offer them value that value isn’t necessarily only into selling product, physical or digital.
26:09 There’s that again. I go back to the idea of experience of community which I think is what fans want. You just want more.
26:18 Brian Rose: Yeah, language is everything. You need to pay attention with the the language people use.
26:24 Brian Rose: I had a guest on here who said the word users is used by kind of two different types of companies. One is the big tech platforms, and the other is drug dealers. They both call their clients users, so you have to be very careful. Like you said, with the language they use. I had a guest on my show back in the day called Simon Sinek, and he has a book called Start with Why, and if you understand the why of a company, then you can kind of understand where they’re going.
26:52 And I think it’s an important point you make. I mean, the why of Facebook, you know, for all the great things they brought this world, ultimately they’re a company that knows how to make money by monetizing a user experience. That’s why they’re here. They’ve done maybe too good of a job at that, and it’s important to understand that, that probably will be the end resulting product as well, and And you also said fun. I mean, if it’s not fun, then I guess what’s the point, right?
27:20 Brian Rose: That’s why you probably look at life from a gaming perspective, right?
27:25 Sébastien Borget: I think that’s really We’ve seen again, 25 years old, 25 years of virtual worlds before, and we’ve tried to analyze what went wrong with them like, the map is not something new we invented. We’ve seen that before in GTA or other places, virtual worlds with avatars. We didn’t even do that either But we try to embrace what people want to do, while we embrace what all of those concepts of neighborhood, of mashing up a lot of IPs and electing them letting the user assemble, play around with their favorite brands and use, generating content the way they want, mix it up the way they want, create more content, and have brands align with that idea rather than being productive against that And we’re definitely using gaming and game mechanics to make people come back, because if they come once, they try it, they say, yeah, okay, it’s fun maybe, and they never come back.
28:27 It’s going to end up very much the same, unfortunately And we’ve seen that with a lot of good technology which didn’t massively yet convinced for adoption. So I’m not saying we have solved that challenge. It’s a real challenge that any company has, but we try to understand with the right why to try to give an answer that’s appropriate, and it’s a work in progress.
28:52 Brian Rose: Yeah, just to close with Facebook, you know, one of the things that Yat said when he was here is he said Brian, this is the most important struggle of our lifetimes, maybe of humanity is to keep the metaverse open as opposed to closed.
29:08 And you know, Yat is not a guy to say things that he doesn’t mean, and he said, you know, probably the only serious thing he said on the show was, we need to fight for this open metaverse because it really is our very future, our very human existence. Do you believe that this is as serious of a fight as that, and do you believe that the jury’s not out as of where we’re going to win it or not and keep it open?
29:36 Sébastien Borget: I couldn’t agree 100% more than that. Like, if I was, we need to be vocal, we need to be supportive we need to be understanding, like, what we’re doing here.
29:46 Beside all the style of web server, what Web3 is ultimately about is being community driven, and allowing users to pushing through this new digital partnership where users can hold their identity and their assets It would be so easy to just be complacent with Web2. We just go back to the easiness of how everything can be done in a blink of an eye, and you close your eyes on a lot of, like, data privacy and other aspects and let them run. Yes, and so, because more and more people become aware and a deer become part of this Web3 movement, including that surprising many of the Apple and Google and Facebook employees now flowing into those Web3 companies.
30:39 The change can come, and It’s a very friendly, very passive, pacific revolution, I think, in a way, but it’s one important to fight for, if we believe that our kids and the next generation should have those rights online to own their digital assets that they should value, as they already value their digital asset more, sometimes, than physical asset. And it’s important to fight for.
31:04 Brian Rose: Yeah, I think it’s also important to fight for your choice of that virtual experience And just, I’ll make one last point, and then I want to dive deep into The Sandbox, but I had a guest on recently who said, Brian, do you know that they did studies on humans where they slightly changed the Facebook news feed of articles, and they could make someone get angry or sad based on those stories, and apparently there’s been studies on this and he said, okay, that’s a news feed.
31:34 Imagine a virtual world where, like, little things could be happening, and I keep thinking maybe there’s a honking horn in the background over and over again. You know, maybe there’s negative, who knows? Imagine just giving your entire experience over to an entity that, again, you just don’t know what their motivations are, and that, for me, seems just something that we just need to be careful of, and try to have open versions of that, because that seems you know, about a thousand times more dangerous than a news feed.
32:06 Sébastien Borget: So that I think, like, well, having human feelings, having human reaction to content, is normal, and you’ll get that into experiment, even watching a news feed is a form of experience. What’s wrong is that it is actually an algorithm that is optimizing the content of the news feed based only on the thing you like, and that’s it. So it’s great. It’s progressively removing you from, is part of the reality, or it’s driving you into another reality which might not be the reality for most, and that’s what we’ve seen.
32:42 It leads sometimes to political impact and more, whereas I do believe, like, everyone into a world, the world is not programmatically changing all the time based on data-driven at least well, so far I don’t know any technology capable of that. So we are living in an experience, and what makes us makes each experience unique to us is also, like, how we play around it, but we still in control, or how we interact with others at certain points of time, which might change, but then it’s still much more driven by us than being driven by a non-transparent algorithm owned by a private company, which you don’t know if their interest is as aligned to protect you as a user or not.
33:26 Brian Rose: Yeah, no, good explanation.
33:28 Then they’re probably optimizing for emotional reaction, attention that might lead to commerce, probably, but like you said, we don’t know, and again you just described it there. We all are in our own versions of closed metaverse versus now, through our feeds, through our YouTube suggestions, our Twitter, our Instagram feeds. We’re already there. You just pretty much explained that right now. So that already is some weird version of a closed metaverse, so you have to make sure you find a way to go open.
33:54 Sébastien Borget: Like you said, the world is open at this point. It’s not algorithmically generated. It’s what we do with humans right now. So yeah, we want to tend to have that in our metaverse.
34:05 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about The Sandbox.
34:07 Brian Rose: I know a little bit about The Sandbox because I’ve been talking to Yat I have some SAND. I have an account. I’m looking forward to the next alpha launch where I can get in there and play. For people that don’t know what the interface of The Sandbox is, what the experience is like How would you describe what you have built, including the SAND token, the LAND token, and some of the assets inside? Again, explaining to someone new, what is the experience like for them?
34:37 Sébastien Borget: So we’ve created this platform where, with different tools, a 3D editor, an animation tool, a map, a marketplace, a game maker that is no code, so anyone can accessibly create games just by drag and drop, and a game client that allows you to access the experiences. You enter The Sandbox with an account which is linked to a wallet and an avatar for entering the experiences. We launched last December for the first time, our first alpha season, which lasts for 20 days, more or less, and we’ve enabled users to try out, get the first feeling, a first taste of our vision of, like, mixing up culture, content from brands, from creators, from Web3 ecosystem itself to play around with an avatar doing values action and to collect winquest, collect resources and claim rewards afterwards.
35:37 That’s roughly what the first alpha Sandbox was about, and it’s been tremendously successful We have had more than 200,000 active users at peak. We had more than 96% of engagement from day one till the last day, and people converting their rewards, claiming their reward at the end, which, again, I’ve never seen such high level of engagement before in any other product or platform. Next version is going to go even further into that sense. Like, we’re going to have more than 28 experiences, one third of them generated by users, more social hubs, more activities No longer you need to hold the path in order to access the experience, so anyone can access any experiences.
36:29 Just you need a pass to claim at the end, so you get to choose if you want or not to claim the rewards. And we’re reopening that. It will help even more for people, a greater number of people, to get a feeling for themselves for what it is that we’re building, and what it is they can build themselves, because all of that is actually being done with one single ID. This is an inspiration for what you can do with those creation tools on your own land if you want to become a builder and be part of creating the metaverse with this community.
37:09 Brian Rose: And Sébastien, be honest with me, you didn’t know how this launch was going to go, and you’re thinking Wow, I mean, no one’s ever done this before. Everyone’s been talking about it for years and years and years, but I mean, when you actually put it together, you don’t know what’s gonna happen. You know, if, especially, the more open it is the more chaos can break out. Like, how did it go, actually? And what surprised you?
37:30 What was good? What was bad,
37:32 Sébastien Borget: having been 10 years into video games, you know, you use soft launch usually, like you launch into a certain country, you collect data, you see how things go, and you optimize for that data to increase your metrics. Here, it’s right, like, we didn’t set any smaller group launch. That was our first test. And we were stressed.
37:55 Like, we were stressed for so many reasons. We’ve never done it before maybe we didn’t scale all the servers, the platform enough, it would crash, it could be boring, etc. but somehow everything was aligned, and yes, we had small hiccups, but they were quickly addressed, and the rest was, I think, the community. The social posts show that was really engaging and fun. I think we’ve seen people start to see, to even tell us, like, you are not realizing how what I’ve participated in is such an important moment in the definition of what future metaverse is.
38:35 It’s a little bit like the very first virtual concert, which was, I believe, like, Travis called in Fortnite assets for whole generation of people. What, where it’s going? Here we set a cap of where you can go And well, at least we’re here still, and we are going to do better seasons, and we are seeing a growing community of more and more enthusiastic people, which is great. It’s a great way to keep building and keep going.
39:06 Brian Rose: Well, congrats on that.
39:08 It is groundbreaking stuff, and like you said, like, Travis Scott’s first, you know, concert on Fortnite, or, you know, I would say, like, you know, Joe Rogan’s first video podcast. It was like, you know, it kind of set the tune for what other people would do. It’s what kind of what we kind of did here as well, and you know, it’s important what people are seeing right now because it really will change the flavor of what people do, and see, and want going forward.
39:33 So these are, like, very important, kind of, like, test beds.
39:37 Sébastien Borget: Oh yes, sometimes I compare it, like, think of Woodstock festival, what is done to a whole generation of people, than Travis Scott, a whole generation of, like, more digital native, and what the first alpha of metaverse can do to all that next generation of people who are going to spend more time into it.
39:55 Brian Rose: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And usually at the time it was controversial, risky, innovative, and then over time people look back and say, well, of course that was the obvious move, you know, but at the time there was a lot of, you know, big chances being taken, and you weren’t necessarily sure what the outcome would be.
40:13 So yeah, this is super exciting times. Let me ask you a question about practicality I’m here, Brian Rose, I’m in London. I know I’ve had London Real for 10 years, and I’m eyeing a piece of land in The Sandbox on OpenSea for, I guess, just under four ETH right now, which is last time I checked market price of one of the cheaper parcels on The Sandbox. I’ve got some SAND that I got after talking to Animoca Brands, because they were saying great things about you.
40:39 If I want to take my Sandbox experience to the next level, let’s say to the Snoop Dogg level, what do I do next? Do I get that piece of land? Do I go build a game in there or do I just put my logo up? What are kind of my next steps as a brand or even as a game player, that I should go on The Sandbox? Do I need to wait for the next alpha launch as well?
41:04 Sébastien Borget: Right now we’re still in this alpha mode where not everything is open, like alpha open to show the possibilities. Then later on this year, we’re going to enable users, indeed, to publish their experience directly on their land and anyone can access them. So it’s on our roadmap. And I’m excited because it’s coming up this year. So we’re going to see a lot more user-generated content, etc.
41:37 With creators who have been inspired by the system we put in place, like NFT gating, NFT rewards, the concept of season etc. And from there, anyone with their avatar should be able to access a great diversity of experiences, because some people will build concerts, some will build social places, some might be focusing on mental health, well-being art galleries, etc. A great choice of content you can access through an avatar all built by users but leveraging an ecosystem, tools and IPs, and brands.
42:18 Brian Rose: Do I have to own a piece of land to host a game and create my game, so that way when you come in, you go to my piece of land to play my game, or are there other ways?
42:30 Sébastien Borget: No, you do not need any purchase at all to get started. All the creation tools are free. You can create directly or with the game maker, and only at the last moment, if you want to publish something on the line to the public you need, indeed, to have a land where to publish.
42:51 Brian Rose: Okay, all right, understood.
42:53 So I can create the game, but then ultimately, if I want people to play that game I need a piece of land to publish, and that, and then they find me via that coordinate, or they can go around, and then when they get to that land, then they enter my gaming experience. Great, okay. And there’s 166,000 plus unique parcels of land, and I’m guessing that’s just the surface area of the Earth divided into 96 by 96 meter squares. Did I get that right, or is my math and my engineering degree failing me?
43:28 Sébastien Borget: Nope, that’s correct. 166,464 LAND in total right now. The Sandbox has about 2 million registered wallet accounts, which is, and is growing every week. We feel like overall our estimate is that there will be somewhere 20-30,000 experiences and games available on the map once it’s fully open and live And in the meantime, like, there will be probably a couple dozen, a couple hundred of experiences already to engage for users with avatars. We are seeing more than 19,000 landowners at the moment, as well, about 70% of the map was built, which is giving us a good feeling for where it’s going to evolve
44:16 Brian Rose: And you know, as one CEO, or C-E-O, to another, what do you think I should do with The Sandbox should I get a parcel of land?
44:26 Should I create something? Should I create a something like London Real, where they can go in there and watch videos and go into the academy? How do you advise business owners or influencers on how to use The Sandbox? Do I need to do this today, like, what do you recommend?
44:49 Sébastien Borget: I would, I think, really like, it’s up to you, because the map is being built in a way with releasing IPs, releasing, like, neighborhoods progressively.
45:02 It’s but it’s unfolding, and what you’re seeing now with your neighbor might not be who is your neighbor in six months or in 12 months. It keeps evolving If you’re interested in it, if you feel like, I want, and you’re lucky to acquire land early on one of our regular land sale, or if you’re lucky to get it on the secondary market as well, you can definitely enter now. Like, we’re seeing many people showing their intention to build the metaverse by acquiring land right now, putting their logo on the land, etc.
45:43 I want to say it’s not necessarily a requirement. It’s not a barrier to entry. It’s just, like, a practice we’re seeing in the community
45:51 Brian Rose: Right? I mean, I think I had a guest on my show many years ago who said that great art is actually created by constraint, by having limitations, and then you can create a great piece of art, maybe a great piece of dance a great piece, whatever, and so it sounds like you’re kind of doing that by saying, look, this is the world we’ve got these parcels.
46:12 You create an avatar, but then you can go create anything, but at least it gives it a framework and an order, where I can go here, I can go to the neighborhood, I can do this. So I mean I guess you do have some constraints in order to create more creativity, somehow.
46:32 Sébastien Borget: Yes, and that’s being done through improving, always, the game maker tool, adding more features adding more elements to it that really enables, I don’t know, the development of more novel experiences.
46:47 For example, at the moment, game maker is still very much it’s a better, we call it beta 0.6, not even 1.0. It has mostly, like, RPG quest, narrative kind of gameplay element behaviors component. It doesn’t have first-person shooter, for example. It doesn’t have, like, multiplayer parkour games, or cinematic kind of building. We know, like, the community wants them, so it’s already on our roadmap.
47:18 We already have five years of roadmap development for this product, if we want to fulfill the whole vision of a true game maker can make any kind of game, any kind of experience without any code. So that’s then it’s a matter of prioritization. Like, what do we release first? So we, again, we provide more creativity in the tools of the builders and creators And that’s something that we believe a DAO governed by the community can help us and help them decide.
47:56 So it’s not, no longer, just us for us as a centralized company, a decision to take. We’re going to work on it and prioritize with the community, right?
48:05 Brian Rose: Okay, and I want to talk about how you make that evolution, but so for now people should know that their experience now is the current version, and it will evolve into kind of better tech, better, you know, experience as you proceed over time, but I guess you do need to start and kind of show the premise and the hypothesis of what you’re doing.
48:26 Sébastien Borget: The alpha tests allow people to start participating and then it just will evolve, but there will always be the fixed number of parcels of land, the open NFT aspect of it.
48:37 Brian Rose: And then it’s like, I guess, wherever the community kind of takes it from there. Can we talk about Snoop because it’s maybe a perfect example. I mean, we talked about the Doggies earlier, but he bought some parcels of land. He’s building his house, and then, you know, maybe you can use that as an example of what he’s going to do in the future, and what maybe an influencer could do or even a brand could do in the future.
49:04 Sébastien Borget: I think it’s definitely setting up a standard. They are not the only one. Like, we have now more than 200 brands There’s The Walking Dead, there’s Kerberos, there’s Smurf, there’s, uh, then mao, there’s Adidas, there’s Warner Music, there’s Ubisoft, and Rabbit Gushy Vault and a bunch more that are either to be announced or that came in all by themselves by powering land Recently, I believe, like, by embracing the adults of Web3 By understanding what we’ve done claim many of them are actually playing to understand what it is we’re doing Just see behind me all that background with all those characters matching up.
49:52 They understand that by coming, they are part of something bigger, something that’s more cultural, more lifestyle, that’s global, that connects users from both U.S., Korea, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Turkey, and more, like, as we have in Sandbox, and they cannot enter Sandbox and restrict users to, oh, you cannot use my NFT into your own world, or you cannot use my NFT to, and mix it with another brand NFT to make your own experience. Those are restrictions we cannot put in place, so it’s de facto the condition to enter the open metaverse is also to be opened about what you want to let your fans do, and it’s our role to educate about that, so that’s why today we’re discussing it as well, and we’re trying to explain why it is motivating for brands to be closer to what fans truly want
50:46 Brian Rose: How, I mean, Sébastien, how do you turn that, make sure that doesn’t turn into chaos?
50:52 You know, we’ve all had the experience where we had a house party and we invited everybody in the neighborhood and they all came over, and it got a little out of control, right? They were drinking everything in the cupboards, and you know, you wanted everybody to have a good time, but it was fun, and the next day you’re cleaning up, two days later. How do you make that bridge to where it doesn’t turn into chaos, but it’s still a good experience? And how do you bridge that gap over the next few years?
51:17 Sébastien Borget: Well, first of all, nothing breaks in the metaverse. That’s good news. You do not need to clean your house, the virtual house. Says always clean. Joke apart, safety is an important matter that’s not necessarily related to Web3 here, like moderation of behaviors, ensuring that there is within the community always more protection for the users, and is important as well, and that’s why we have terms of use as a platform, and we can moderate things that are not combined with autonomous.
51:56 We cannot remove, we cannot take away your ownership. That’s your right but we still have, the platform can restrict the fact that others do see that or behave inappropriately, and that’s an important element, I think, like, to become mainstream to have in place the right tools, the right protections, and even the right incentive for the community to self-moderate By, for your token incentive, if users can report via token, inappropriate behaviors or inappropriate content, and they get rewarded for that After controlling, and people who do bad things are punished, it creates, somehow, automatically self-regulation. You’re not going to do something bad because you know that someone is incentivized and earn a revenue if you actually, if your report, if he reports you, but if someone reports you while you didn’t do anything wrong, they are also penalized.
53:00 And we believe that at least we are going to implement it and hope it will bring good, greater good in the community.
53:07 Brian Rose: Okay, let me ask you a question about some of your competitors or colleagues, because I know everybody in the crypto space wins when everybody wins. But the two, the two ones that come to my mind, and I’m probably missing one, are Axie, which again did some great work a couple of years ago by showing that play to earn works, and, you know, employed people in the Philippines during the lockdown, and obviously, you know, Yat was early investor in them and Animoca, and that’s been interesting.
53:34 I’d love you to comment on Axie and how that’s different from what you’re doing. Obviously you can play to earn there, but it does cost money to kind of start Axie. Sébastien, I played Axie a couple months ago. I forced myself to play. You know, I’m 50 years old.
53:48 I’m not really a gamer, but I went and I bought three Axies. I spent the Ethereum. I had them fight some other Axies. One of them died. I thought I lost my 300 bucks, but he was back again, so it was a good experience.
53:59 I learned from it, but I also saw what Axie was. I was wondering if you could comment on that, and also Decentraland which has the MANA token. I’m just wondering what you see there. I see big brands like JP Morgan showing up on Decentraland and grabbing real estate, and I’m wondering if they are more going more of a corporate way, and you’re going more of an influencer way, or if I’m totally misreading those. So if you could comment, I’m really just curious.
54:27 I have a lot of students at my DeFi Academy, and they’re always saying, Brian, first of all, what is the metaverse? I always say, go watch Yat. Now I’ll say, go watch Sébastien, and then they say, well, what about these tokens in the top 100 market caps, which ones do what? So I thought I would ask you, maybe you can walk us through these two examples or another, if I’m missing it.
54:48 Sébastien Borget: All right.
54:49 So you, on your question about, like, what’s Decentraland, is another example of a decentralized tribal. They started earlier one year earlier than us, but from Argentina as well, quite interestingly very close by, and they went in a slightly different model. Like, they sold all the lands initially, and then it’s been acquired by users, so early adopters had more chances than late adopters in this model. Then in Sandbox, what we did is, like, we are selling progressively over time, which trying, and we are trying to build a neighborhood of interest where the value is not necessarily only concentrated at the center And there’s been recently reports from Messari, from non-fungible except DappRadar that show what valuable land, etc., which, so far, it seems we have done a good job at, not concentrating in one place.
55:50 The value, however, they’ve done, they’ve gone full decentralization already much faster. Like, Decentraland is a DAO, it’s only entirely being managed by the community It’s, they have some proposals and mission votes, and they are already advancing without someone, without the core team still being present to lead. What’s, where this one is going, etc. So I think it’s a great example of, like, what a quick full decentralization, versus more long, mid-term decentralization in the case of Sandbox, with planning in three to five years, progressively is happening.
56:36 Both models are really interesting, and I think, like, there’s no right and wrong. It’s just, like, it’s being followed the initial plan, it’s Infinity.
56:46 Brian Rose: Did they have a live game in Decentraland?
56:49 Sébastien Borget: Yes, yes, it’s accessible at any time It’s web-based, so you connect your wallet on the web, and you can then already access experiences is more focused towards live events than games, so far, from the community but you can see a lot of things happening in Decentraland.
57:06 They have their event page, etc., which is, it’s great. Again, then Axie Infinity, which we’re leading, blaze trailing the way since last year, term of adoption in terms of, like, growing the overall market, if they have anywhere to million plus daily active users on the on their game, but without that requirement, that’s a little bit creative of owning free taxes in order to be able to fight It led to guilds to appear, guilds being those community of players who owned collectively asset heal Axies and share them across users. Guilds also did a great job at educating users through the scholarship and bringing more and more users through that.
58:00 So it’s interesting that it’s already been growing and inconsistent, same as Sandbox as an outlook It’s ecosystem of builders and more, and it’s been made popular in a region of the world and with people who were not gamers before. So in a way it opened new opportunities, brought more users, and it’s still performing As far as I am aware, it’s the dominant game currently which is going to inspire more creators, more builders, to build their own play to earn, and this year we’re going to see more and more, I see, like, or not, game on the market, and hopefully that will trigger an acceleration toward adoption in general of blockchain and NFTs. in gaming.
58:47 Brian Rose: Well, do you think in the future I might go on to Sandbox and have an Axie-like experience where I could go on and play something similar, or could I play Axie in The Sandbox?
59:00 Sébastien Borget: It’s a well, I think, the NFT, your Axie can be recognized, and you can get Axies as companion, for example in Sandbox. That’s a very much likely future. Axie is a game turning into a platform, so they launch one game that, as a simple call loop, you raise small creators, three of them, you battle them, you collect resources, and use them to breed and raise and train and fight again But that was not all.
59:30 What Axie is, Axie is an IP. It’s a platform which will have a map will have more games, etc., based on what the way they describe it. Sandbox started as a platform. It doesn’t have a game yet, or well, as I said, it does gameplay. It has the season, but it doesn’t have, like, one flagship title which is always repeating the same action.
59:50 It took us more time to build the platform and the tools, and we’ll hope the community will come with its own flagship title. Maybe The Sandbox will have its own Axie kind of content that will come and be very successful. We’ve seen that before with Roblox, the pizza delivery boy, or Cobb vs. Robbers became massive hits on the platform, like Roblox And it led to a lot new creativity that was like experiment, so a new format of entertainment on the platform that attracted the users and grew into its own success, right?
1:00:28 Brian Rose: That’s the essence of Web 3.0, right? You create the platform, and then these great games just come about because people create them, and they get user adoption, and they monetize them, and you kind of set the stage and allow the creativity to happen. It’s exciting. I recently had Sami Shoglu from Across the Ages here at the studio. He came in from Marseille, and he’s creating this, you know, whole, you know, incredible story with seven books and NFTs and this incredible kind of future metaverse that is thinking, you know, long term and big picture, and I was just wondering what you see out there in the metaverse, where you see, obviously Axie got out there and put something up, and it’s this functional game that’s working.
1:01:17 It’s got users. I battled my Axies people are making a living off of it, but we also see it now as a simple game, and then we see someone like Sami come in here in my studio, and we’ve invested in his company through Londonville Ventures, and I just, I just, my jaw drops when he starts talking about this stuff, because I’m not from the gaming world, I’m not from the world of, you know, dystopian futures and mythology But I hear his version, and it seems like a next level four or five dimensional metaverse versus, obviously, some of the simple stuff we see now. What do you see when you see, like, Across the Ages or some of these really big picture ideas, does it make you excited about the future, and do you see them weaving into something like a Sandbox as they transition?
1:02:05 Sébastien Borget: I’m always excited when I see, like, entrepreneur like Sami, who’s been building games and building a business of, like, physical collectible books, games, cards since she was like nine years old, I believe. Yeah, until he turned that experience in the way he was fun, and he understood what collectible mean into this transmedia experience that is across the age. That’s the book. It has the IP. It has a physical call.
1:02:32 It does the NFT. It’s really interesting. It’s the approach, and if you’re not familiar, I encourage you to have a look and see for yourself. I, so yes, generally speaking, I’m very positive in general when someone new comes into the space, and try to offer something based on, like, its own core value of, like, why I’m entering into space, but I want to share what I have. I want to create the community around those core concepts that I’m very attached to I’m also very thrilled, in a way.
1:03:10 I like to see to see the great diversity of content that we’re seeing now. Yes, yes, there is a lot of hype. No, not everything is going to be valuable over time, and you should be careful, but there is at least creativity again in the space which I haven’t seen for a long time in gaming in terms of, like, what can be launched and how it can become well, the next generation of successful game in Web3, well, it’s to be honest, like, mobile gaming has been very repetitive And only optimized towards, like, trying to maximize transactions and top-grossing titles for almost a decade now, so it’s very refreshing currently.
1:04:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s, I keep thinking about the world. I mean, you’ve been in gaming for so long, but like you said, the mobile gaming and the emphasis on that small percentage that would then buy something and again, those big gatekeepers meant that it just never maybe got as creative as it could, and now you’ve seen like all these projects. Very interesting to see how they play out and how they realize itself. For you your next milestone is your next alpha launch.
1:04:28 Brian Rose: I’m just curious, for you as the CEO of Sandbox, what’s your biggest challenge, you know, for 2022, for 2023. I mean, I know on one hand you probably got brands and influencers on the other hand, you got technology, I guess, on the other hand, you have users. So what’s the biggest challenge for you
1:04:53 Sébastien Borget: I would say three main challenges. Creativity, so keep building experiences keep leading the way, into inspiring others to make things that are, like, worth to be enjoyed by users, into the manners Technology, so making, building, having the features that enable, like, more immersive experiences more multiplayer, faster performance, and more accessibility of wallets And I would say this third one is basically scaling all we have now, so we can deliver to more partners We can build an ecosystem where there will be millions of jobs, but also businesses behind that establish themselves whether they are metaverse agencies, whether they are virtual real estate brokers, platform, marketplace, or agencies, or they are architects, studios, fashion houses, and people who are going to contribute building content and interface between landowners, brands, to help those, their ideas come to life into the metaverse That’s on one side, like, growing that ecosystem, not just have 50 builders studio as we have now, but thousands, several tens of thousands is going to be.
1:06:23 It’s a massive effort, and we are aware that there is a strong demand, and we’re putting in place values program bootcamp academy And we’re going to accelerate, also, like, making sure users will have fun and we’ll come back, so everything we’re designing for is not just words, but they are. It’s actually working, and it keeps working. People are coming and coming back and exploring. They might come from Snoop, then they stay, and they discover that new game from not yet known creator, discovering what he’s doing, etc., like kicking off this network effect, as more land will be opening putting in place the first step towards the governance, as per our roadmap And yeah, and that’s already a great amount of challenge for 2022 and 2023.
1:07:26 Brian Rose: Sébastien, talk to me about transitioning to this DAO. It’s something I’ve talked to in the studio with people like you know, Stani Kulechov from Aave, and people I’ve talked to, with, you know, Mance Harmon from Hedera Hashgraph, they all you know, correctly, so have this plan to transition to a DAO, but I also ask hard questions. Is that without leadership, without decisions being made at the top, without deadlines and teams, then it’s possible that things don’t get built in time and your protocol becomes, you know, it just becomes pointless, you know, and there’s no traction How do you make that transition, and how do you do that successfully?
1:08:08 And is it obvious that you can do some of these great milestones without, you know, strong leadership and decisions, in an HR department and all that, because I’m I’m still not convinced that a DAO can do all of these wonderful things without having leadership. So tell me what your thoughts are.
1:08:27 Sébastien Borget: Of course you’re not convinced, and of course it’s hard to complement It’s not like we’ve, everyone has done that before. Like, we’re exploring a whole new model where we are moving from, like, the core team, the people who participate to the building, which will suddenly are handing out all the power to the community.
1:08:48 I think it’s ultimately the right thing to do, and it needs to be done as part of the plan. But it’s not like we know exactly how it should be done at the micro level, and what is an important decision to follow. This is a not important, non-important one. How do you balance the weight of voting power depending on, like, SAND ownership, LAND ownership, or I don’t know, your engagement of your avatar etc. The Decentraland has done it very early on, and so it’s one way, and it’s definitely very interesting to see and learn, and how they are still delivering on their milestone, etc.
1:09:28 Like you mentioned, is exemplary It’s a good example to follow. There’s such a few examples yet, that I think we’re still in the early days, and I hope that with the support of the community, Sandbox will do it right as well.
1:09:43 Brian Rose: Is it hard for you as an entrepreneur to even, you know, make that transition or consider it? I mean, again, I’ve talked to a lot of a lot of blockchain, you know, creators about this, layer ones and layer twos, and, you know, even the whole mentality of entrepreneurship isn’t used to giving it all back to the community.
1:10:05 You know, even VCs aren’t used to this kind of thing. Is it also a challenge for you to just think, okay, how can I not be involved, how can I empower them, whereas in the past, if you didn’t make decisions, Sandbox might have died. I don’t know, maybe you can speak on that.
1:10:25 Sébastien Borget: It’s, I like to think of it this way. Like, Sandbox, it’s actually a product we started in 2011 on mobile.
1:10:32 So we consider it’s almost a teenager, 10, 11 years old now. It’s evolving into its third version If we educate it well, it might grow into an adult that can then be self-supporting itself and become successful on its own, and I hope that will do that right job to educate it, educate the community that makes Sandbox alive and full of content, so that indeed it will be successful It has to be. We have to put the right incentive for people, as you said, to be committed on timelines, to see the effect of, like, if they miss the deadline they are directly impacted by it, not other platform, really, them as the owner So it’s about making the community not only technically be the owner, but also psychologically be the owner of running that world, and that’s why very often I try to compare Sandbox to a digital nation I say, like, the citizen, the people who make it, are really the inhabitants of that new nation And the fate of Sandbox will rely in their hands progressively
1:11:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, all right, that’s super powerful.
1:11:52 Brian Rose: You know, just a couple final things, Sébastien. You know, there’s probably CEOs of companies and maybe influencers that are watching this now that haven’t, you know, dipped their toe into The Sandbox, and I’m sure you have these conversations with these people all the time and have for years, and I’m curious, what is the main question or concern that a big brand would have, or even someone, I’m thinking like a Frank Sinatra, if he was still alive you know, maybe he’s, well, he was pretty cool, so he’s maybe as cool as Snoop, but maybe not his forward thinking How do you have that conversation where you say to them, look, this is why you need to be on The Sandbox or why you need to be in the metaverse? I’m curious, what are the kind of things you say to them, and what are the kind of things they ask you?
1:12:40 Sébastien Borget: Well, I think, like, the number one question And it’s still where we need to get better at educating, is What can I do in the metaverse? Like, and that’s why it’s important to inspire with use cases, good use cases, maybe by a vertical, because now that there is this Morgan Stanley report that shows that the metaverse is going to be a four trillion dollar opportunity over the next 10 years. Many CEOs, many executive committee of large companies are asking the question.
1:13:16 They want to enter the metaverse, and they need, they need that education, that support, to understand what we can do with it And that’s why I’m trying to explain, like, how to approach it, is to approach it with not this client, customer approach but this more fun and closer to the people who will be spending more time with you in virtual worlds and experiences kind of angle.
1:13:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, we, so we did our first NFT release about two weeks ago, and we had done a broadcast here in studio, a live broadcast with a guest, and it had been watched about one and a half million times, and afterwards I thought, how could we create an NFT that would add more value to those people, so we took a hundred of the images taken on the day between me and the guest, and I took a piece of the video of that broadcast, and we baked it into the NFT, and then we gave it to a hundred of our most dedicated members, and in my mind it was a real success, because people were happy, they got some value, we kind of got a little NFT experience, but there was a lot of lessons I learned from, you know, people like you over the last six months, 12 months, that said, Brian, you know, this should always add value to your fans, add value to community, never extract value to your community.
1:14:33 Brian Rose: Just thoughts on that you have for influencers as far as how they need to approach NFTs and metaverse, is it that kind of a way of looking at things, of adding a new dimension of value or connection, and how do you usually tell people to do that?
1:14:51 Sébastien Borget: I would say, like, look at what your fan first. Listen, what do they want most to incorporate that into how you generate that energy and what it enables them to do. Because value is really personal. Each community and each brand, and it’s fun, will perceive value differently.
1:15:12 Some will value with a celebrity, like the fact to assist a special concert just for them. Some might value, for a product, to understand how the the artisan, the artist came up with the idea, the story behind it. Some will value just discovering products ahead of others being able to be given a priority access to it, etc. So, unders, that’s the first step: being closer to the community to understand that. The second thing is, like, value is not something that stands the test of time.
1:15:47 So it’s an evolving thing, so you did it once, so what do you keep doing now, so that the holder of those NFTs still get some benefit, not just six months ago, but as of today Do they get premier access to your recording? Do they get to be part of the people who can ask the question? Can they be into a virtual world with you and see and participate live when you do that? I don’t know yet. You have to see with them what makes more sense.
1:16:18 Brian Rose: Okay, that’s super helpful, and the Doggies. I mean, I thought we were being innovative by putting video on the blockchain, but the Doggies sound pretty interesting, so just curious on you, do you think that’s the future of NFTs? I mean, you just said ten thousand Doggies, each with their own three-dimensional identity, they all can do things like fight, and these kind of things, I can take him out of the game. Is this the future of NFTs, and I guess, will more of this happen in The Sandbox, and then where does it go from here?
1:16:50 Sébastien Borget: I think it’s, again, like we’ve seen last year a lot of, like, avatar collections where you couldn’t do anything We positioned Sandbox to provide value complementary to any existing collection by allowing users, holders to be able to play and interact with NFT in a new way. So in a way, we position Sandbox to reinforce and add value at any existing NFT collection whether it was meant to or not And we went as far as, like, allowing to transform 2D pictures into 3D characters And now with the Doggy, we’ll take the 3D character format directly native to Sandbox, and hello to plan, interact with it, not in 12 months, not in 24 months, in two weeks from the launch date. That’s the effort we’re trying to do, and maybe someone else in the ecosystem will come up with even more value, and we say, oh, you know what, I want to offer something so much to Snoop fan that they can get a free, I don’t know, of access to my land, a free slushie in the shop to all the Snoop fans.
1:17:57 That’s also possible, like, the ecosystem can keep extending value by leveraging this energy format which is a particular possibility, approximately, that was not present before. If I knew all the model that will work in two days, two years, five years from now, already, now, well that would be a much faster way to build and succeed. I think, like, there’s still a lot of experimentation and from experimentation, it’s great, we’re seeing where, and we’re going to come up with, like, the real future model that rewards everyone perfectly.
1:18:39 Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s pretty exciting. I mean, you are, this feels like the cutting edge of innovation for NFTs and metaverse. What you’re doing now, and it’ll be interesting to see, like, where it goes from here and how this even experience plays out. Just maybe a final note to developers that are watching Curious on Sandbox moving to layer ones and other platforms in the future. It’s a conversation we have a lot here I plugged my MetaMask via, I think, Ethereum wallet into my Sandbox account now.
1:19:09 Just future of Sandbox will it be rolled out on a lot of the layer ones? Do you see that as being crucial to your success You know, I’ve had the founders of AVAX and TRON here, and Hedera, and a bunch of the top layer ones saying that speed is king, especially in the metaverse. Nobody wants to wait, even more than a second when their you know, character goes to the next level. Do you see speed as being important? Does that mean coming off Ethereum or does that mean other layer ones?
1:19:38 Brian Rose: Just curious.
1:19:39 Sébastien Borget: I think again, 2021 2022, as more than before, made the choice of which blockchain, which protocol to start with, a difficult one. I used to have just one main blockchain with the largest developer ecosystem, the most solutions around, like DeFi DEXs, marketplaces, etc. Today almost any blockchain comes with an ecosystem supports, foundation behind to attract developers and existing community of NFT holders who are buying. It’s true on Hedera, on Cesos, on floor, on Binance, Martial, et cetera.
1:20:24 So ultimately the choice of technology seems to be less and less critical as it was before, because most of those are mature enough to host apps and have agencies large enough for the developers, which is great again. In a decentralized environment, you might not want to just have to rely on one only.
1:20:48 Brian Rose: And are you excited with all of the layer one possibilities? I mean, I’ve been pretty impressed with some of the brain power and tech that’s coming out. Does that just make you really optimistic on speed being something that’s also cheap and accessible in the future, that’ll help you do what you need to do?
1:21:12 Sébastien Borget: Yes, we’ve seen Polygon, the rise of Polygon, typically, that we were integrating and now we have a portion of, we have SAND on Polygon, and we are migrating the rest of the Sandbox token, Polygon, and that’s something that, well, we initially didn’t think we would need to plan for or platform for, but we have also adapted rapidly in 2021 and 22.
1:21:36 Brian Rose: To that fantastic, Sébastien, just want to get your final thoughts on all things metaverse Sandbox, NFTs, and just any message that’s important for people that have been watching, whether they’re new to this space or maybe they’ve been around for a while. Yeah, just your final thoughts.
1:21:55 Sébastien Borget: Well, thanks Brian for the opportunity. If you’re already following Brian and DeFi, you’re one step ahead, and since you already understand what’s the wallet and how to test some applications, the centralized application If you’re not, I guess, like, check for yourself. Join the community, read the resources, worry about what is Sandbox try to enter it, create your avatar, and from there decide if you feel like there’s something for you, you, interesting, fun, engaging, maybe your next job that could be, I could make the metaverse, this interesting opportunity that you will want to be part of.
1:22:36 Brian Rose: And what is the best way for people to learn more about Sandbox? Is it website, or following you on Twitter, etc.?
1:22:45 Sébastien Borget: Correct. Twitter, The Sandbox Game, Discord, Linktree, Docker dot linktree dot ee at the end, slash Sandbox, have all our social links if you wanna join the community. We’re very friendly.
1:23:01 We have everything translating into many languages, and we’re first and foremost the creator community, so really welcoming more creative people and the next alpha launch is weeks away, probably, and so everybody should just be ready for that to jump in and get that experience and test out Sandbox for themselves. I really look forward to it. It will be a great moment.
1:23:25 Brian Rose: Yeah. That’s fantastic.
1:23:26 Brian Rose: All right, Sébastien, really appreciate this. Really appreciate people like you, and Yat, and a lot of people that are really kind of OGs in the gaming space. I’m learning more about metaverse as we go on. I think more people are as well. Congrats on that December alpha launch.
1:23:39 That was really big stuff, and it’s great, it’s great to see videos online now of people inside The Sandbox. You can see what the, is Snoop Dogg, obviously, it’s an amazing partnership for you, and congrats on that. He’s a great ambassador, and his brand just happened to skyrocket, probably to one of the biggest in the world, and he’s just a lot of fun, and I know he’s a hard worker and a great businessman. So Sébastien, wishing you all the best. I’d say to everybody here, go check out Sandbox now.
1:24:06 It’s an incredible example of what this space, you know, will become. It’s leading the, leading the pack, and just appreciate you so Thank you so much, Sébastien.
1:24:15 Sébastien Borget: Thank you, everyone.
1:24:16 Brian Rose: All right, fantastic. We’ll see everybody next time on London Real.
1:24:20 Sébastien Borget: Thank you.
