Blockchain 101: Blockchain in The Sandbox
New to blockchain? No worries; The Sandbox team has your back.
To help you get started, we’ve prepared the Blockchain 101 series, a series of articles to demystify the technology.
This first article will sum up the key elements you need to understand about this technology, how The Sandbox makes use of it, and what the main benefits of using it are.
First, be sure to check out our community and join the discussion:
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Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/vAe4zvY
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The Sandbox is a blockchain gaming platform
The Sandbox is a community-driven gaming platform where creators can share and monetize voxel assets and gaming experiences on the blockchain.
With the support of creators around the world, our goal is to make The Sandbox the new standard in world-building games, with multitudes of user-created 3D voxel assets and games available on the blockchain.
To get an overview of our gaming platform and join our Marketplace, visit https://www.sandbox.game/
What is the Blockchain?
Blockchain is a peer-to-peer technology that enables networks to interact in a decentralized, permissionless, and secure manner.
It can be represented as a digital ledger in which transactions, made in cryptocurrencies* (like bitcoin, or SAND), are recorded chronologically and are publicly spread among all peers of the network. Some peers conserve a copy of the ledger, validate transactions, and are rewarded for this work.
Blockchain is behind some important technological advances that provide a solution for complicated virtual transactions, virtual security, and true ownership, among other things.
With important features to improve the gaming industry including solving issues around copyright infringement in a fair manner, offering creators simple solutions for monetizing their content, and providing secure and trackable transactions, blockchain is beginning to show its full potential as the technology becomes more widely adopted in the industry.
You can learn more about the possibilities of blockchain and how it can improve gaming in our previous article on the subject:
How and why does The Sandbox use Blockchain?
In the gaming space, blockchain can provide players with new experiences such as true ownership of any content bought, security of transactions, and the potential to monetize personal creations.
In The Sandbox, we rely on the Ethereum Blockchain for key aspects of the gaming platform; it allows for immutability, true-ownership, interoperability, and ease of monetization. Those aspects derive directly from the core value proposition of blockchain technologies, so let’s review those individually:
- Immutability: Once artists’ creations are uploaded on the blockchain, they become NFTs* (unique tokens) that cannot be altered by anyone. It is written in the public Ethereum ledger so no one, not even The Sandbox team, can modify them.
- True-ownership*: Creators are the true owners of the assets. Since assets are lying on the blockchain, their creator and owner will possess them through their own blockchain wallets, which only users have access to. The Sandbox, thanks to blockchain integration, provides a non-custodial service that enables users to remain in control of their assets.
- Monetization: Blockchain enables new monetization mechanisms by rewarding creators without a middleman. Even though The Sandbox is facilitating transactions through our Marketplace, rewards for creations will go directly to game makers and artists. More globally, tokens enable the creation of brand new economic and incentivization systems.
- Interoperability: The Sandbox lies on the Ethereum blockchain. We follow standards for every tokens that we use and issue. It means that those tokens are technically compatible with any other platform built on Ethereum. Possibilities are endless.
We tried to explain some of the most common terms of the blockchain space below. If you want to better understand this technology, have a look!
*Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency is a digital currency in which encryption techniques are used to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds, operating independently of a central entity (such as a bank). Any operation and transaction created with any cryptocurrency is public and easily traceable.
The Sandbox’s cryptocurrency token, SAND, is a cryptocurrency based on the Ethereum blockchain that users will be able to use to monetize their creations. For instance, they could buy a LAND parcel they could then terraform and use to create game experiences that can also be monetized.
In other words, players of The Sandbox will be able to create content such as virtual assets or game experiences, exchange them for a cryptocurrency token (SAND), and finally convert their earnings to fiat currencies such as USD.
If you wish to join our Marketplace and get whitelisted for our early token sale, click here: https://www.sandbox.game/en/sand/
Smart Contract
A smart contract is a piece of code that runs on a blockchain. Working as a traditional agreement, it is a computer protocol that enforces the performance of transactions without the need for a third party. As the code is kept in the Ethereum blockchain, it is immutable. For that reason, it is the perfect instrument to control valuable things, like Ether or other digital assets.
The inventor of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, defined smart contracts in the Ethereum White Paper, where he explained that they are “systems that automatically move digital assets according to arbitrary pre-specified rules.”
Smart contracts remove the need for a middleman.
Blockchain Wallet
A blockchain wallet is software that allows you to manage your cryptocurrencies and interact with blockchain technologies like Ethereum. You can use your digital wallet in The Sandbox Marketplace to publish and sell your digital creations using the Ethereum blockchain. The Sandbox supports MetaMask and Bitski wallets.
To join our Marketplace and create your own digital wallet, go to: https://www.sandbox.game/signup
* Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
NFTs are units of value that are non-fungible, unique, and therefore digitally scarce. Non-fungible tokens can’t be replaced by another equal part or quantity. These tokens can adopt the form of debt, software licenses, collectibles, and so on.
The Sandbox NFTs can be seen through our Marketplace at https://www.sandbox.game/en/shop/ and can be created with the help of our free voxel editor, VoxEdit.
Escrow-less auction
Escrow-less auctions allow the use of cryptographic signatures to sell and buy NFTs, without the need to escrow those tokens (avoiding a costly transaction). Our smart contracts relate to our NFTs, called ASSETS, that support this feature.
This process works as follows:
- The seller authorizes our smart contract to exchange any amount of specific ASSETS for a specific amount of ETH/SAND by signing a message with their private key.
- This signed message is stored on our servers, where everyone can see it.
- A buyer can claim this ASSET by presenting this signed message to the smart contract and paying the specified amount. The smart contract will verify its authenticity and then make the exchange.
* True Ownership
Besides the amazing potential of user-generated assets, in The Sandbox metaverse, items have extra value thanks to cross-application interoperability.
In most games, everything a player has accomplished, conquered, and acquired can’t be compared to or interchanged with anything else. Cross-application interoperability in The Sandbox has come to solve what used to be a big problem: true ownership of items that gamers buy. While you can easily use the same item in totally different blockchain games, we can now talk about real ownership.
Glossary
For anything else that we may have missed and for the very specifics on The Sandbox gaming platform and blockchain ecosystem, you can check out our glossary.
