LAND Owner Roadmap — September 2023 Update

The Sandbox
5 min readSep 4, 2023

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Hello to our incredible community of LAND owners from around the world, and welcome to our latest roadmap update!

We’re excited to recap everything that we’ve been working on to bring the metaverse to life. Let’s begin!

TL;DR:

  • Neighborhoods offer dedicated utilities per location and foster network effects between brands and users.
  • Publishing, scheduled for later this year, will allow all LAND owners to launch experiences on their LANDs.
  • Our LAND sales have been successful, contributing to a growing community and increased interest in trading.
  • Monthly NFT claims will benefit LAND owners who have held their LAND for at least 90 days.
  • The new catalyst (CATS) system will be introduced, allowing for minting assets and defining rarity, with different tiers and certain CATS exclusive to premium LAND owners.

Welcome to Neighborhoods

This quarter we introduced neighborhoods — areas on the map that will be key focal points for activations. Neighborhoods were designed to achieve the following:

  • Foster network effects between brands and increase synergies for the users.
  • Generate storytelling capabilities across the ecosystem.
  • Improve our events experience by including dedicated lists showcasing events organized by location.

Neighborhoods are created with two different approaches:

  • Location theme — e.g., Korea with Kverse to foster K-culture, Megacity for Hong-Kong, and more to come this year with India, Turkey, and Japan.
  • Entertainment themes — gaming, fashion, music, movies, and many more to come.

We will be opening neighborhoods on an ongoing basis throughout the year. More than 5,000 new LANDs will be released in 2023 across 6–9 LAND sales.

Improving LAND owner features

We have been working on structuring our business and tech departments around increasing our efforts towards LANDs. We have goals to implement new ways to become a LAND owner and also to improve the features dedicated to LAND holders (both standard and premium).

Our strategy moving forward is defined by 3 key pillars.

Stand Out

We are adding a number of features that increase possibilities for your LANDs and experiences to have moments in the spotlight of The Sandbox ecosystem. We’ve reserved some features for premium LAND owners — we believe doing so preserves the value of premium LAND and better rewards premium holders. Features include:

  • (Premium LAND exclusive) Premium LAND owners now have a special vignette on our map and Open Sea that more clearly separates them from regular LANDs. ✅
  • (Premium LAND exclusive) We remain committed to ensuring that premium LANDs are located in premium locations, near the most famous brands and celebrities. ✅
  • We are working on a highlight feature to enable anyone’s experience to be featured on our website.
  • Exclusive seasons and bonuses will activate across certain neighborhoods.
  • Dedicated activities across specific neighborhoods will launch in collaboration with IPs and brands.
  • (Premium LAND exclusive) We’re going to make “Premium” an on-chain trait for LAND.

Create

The biggest feature release of 2023 will be publishing, allowing all LAND owners to publish experiences on the map. This empowers our network of incredible creators to showcase their creations and provide true utility to LAND tokens. This is a major step in the direction of The Sandbox achieving its long-term vision of becoming UGC-first and a fully decentralized ecosystem powered by a global creator economy.

Your LAND ecosystem

LAND Owners are now representing more than 23,500 members, growing steadily during the past year, thanks to new LAND sales allowing more people to get into the ecosystem and release new content.

At the same time, we have released 2,000+ LANDs in H1 2023, and we changed at the end of last year the LAND sale mechanism to be more fair and transparent to anyone. All our LAND Sales have experienced a lot of traction especially when we compare with current market behavior.

To share a few numbers, we recorded 3,600+ transactions on the secondary market in Q1 2023, with an average holding period of 221 days which clearly shows the support from the community.

Source: nonfungible.com

This heat map clearly shows how users are behaving regarding LAND trading and that the overall map is currently subject to interest without real discrepancies. The main differences appear according to LAND sale locations and how we keep expanding our metaverse.

Monthly NFT claims

LAND owners will benefit from monthly NFT claims for LAND owners who hold their LAND for at least 90 days

The July asset is being finalized, stay tuned for its reveal and the subsequent ones!

What’s Next?

We are constantly looking for new ways to prioritize our LAND owners by upgrading their holder experience in The Sandbox as we journey together into the future of the metaverse. Today, we are excited to leave you with a bonus reveal that will level-up your LAND.

Introducing CATS!

Our upcoming catalyst (CATS) system is designed to supercharge your LAND’s utility. It will be a new system based on Layer2 ERC1155 CATS (combined with NFT abilities featuring in-game effects and a new reveal system) that will be used to mint assets and define rarity. CATS will be broken down into rarity tiers, from common to mythic, and certain CATS will only be available to Premium LAND owners. For now, this is just a teaser of what we have in store for CATS, but we are amped to share more with you in the future!

Launching the LAND Ignition Initiative!
As more LAND gets into the hands of our community, its remaining supply for potential new buyers decreases. It is our duty to make sure that talented creators can have access to LAND to publish their amazing experiences.

In order to achieve this, we will periodically repurchase a specific portion of the LANDs available on secondary markets. This initiative will allow redistributing assets to creators.

These LANDs will be loaned to creators planning to acquire LAND without the current resources to do so in the short term. The Sandbox has always been committed to empower creators, and this is another step in this direction.

Get In on the Action Today

Haven’t claimed your spot in the metaverse yet? Get your LAND today on OpenSea here, and stay tuned on our socials for any upcoming neighborhood-themed LAND sales!

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