LAND Presale 4.3 Post-Mortem: Huge Demand, Tech Issue, Presale Hiccup… and 100% Community-Driven Distribution
TLDR
- The Sandbox has experienced the highest DEMAND (5x times higher) of all our previous presales;
- Unfortunately, due to technical issues, many users were unable to access the map; so this Presale created a less than desirable situation;
- We attempted to interrupt the Presale, but many transactions went through regardless (Etherscan link). We do apologize we were not able to stop it;
- We sold 81% of the available LAND to 840 unique users — including 621 first time land owners (73%) — during the short time the Presale was online; that shows the huge interest for The Sandbox; but the Presale was not on level playing ground, leaving many players frustrated.
- 100% of the revenue from this troubled Presale will go to our community-driven and DAO-governed Foundation (supporting Creators & Game Makers Funds) instead of The Sandbox,
- The Sandbox will craft a better solution for future sales with more scalable and efficient sale mechanics: weekly, auction, lottery…
- The Sandbox has a total of 166,464 LANDS. Of which, we’ve sold 31% to date. And, we will sell the remaining 52% in the next 18 months with a better distribution through our improved public sales;
Following the launch of our Round 4.3 LAND presale, The Sandbox experienced technical issues with the presale portal. Which resulted in an unfair distribution that favored 30% of users. We would like to make a public statement recapping the event and outline our plan for the road ahead.
First and foremost, The Sandbox wants to apologize for the issue and how this may have affected any users who were excited about the LAND presale. We’d like you all to rest assured that this doesn’t affect our motivation or long term vision to build an open metaverse where players and creators are empowered through decentralized technology in an equitable way.
Reflections on the LAND Presale
Here’s what happened:
- We’ve been experiencing an unprecedented increase in demand for each LAND Presale to date. This particular round was the highest we have ever seen with close to 5,000 users simultaneously looking to participate in the presale.
- Due to this spike in demand, we ran into technical issues regarding throughput and equitable access.
When the presale opened at 1PM GMT we noticed users experiencing issues connecting their wallet and browsing the LAND map to make a purchase.
We immediately decided to put the website under maintenance.
While our technical team continued to investigate into the issues, one of The Sandbox Ambassadors @JosephMadding continued his live stream of the presale and provided assistance to the users. He was quickly joined by Sebastien Borget, the COO & Co-Founder who provided transparent feedback and status, and involved the community into the decisions being made.
Behind the scenes, the technical team worked on addressing the issues with the following patches:
- Fixed a bug when SQL connections timed out
- Reviewed all CloudFlare routes (the CDN network that allows our site to scale)
- Enabled a connection pooling feature to avoid overloading the database
- Enabled CloudFlare cache purge script
These fixes were geared toward addressing the spike in demand and allowing for a better experience to all those eager to join the presale.
At 2.30PM GMT, after overwhelming support to re-open the LAND presale rather than delay it for a day, we took down the maintenance page, and followed through with the request from the community to display a 10 minute countdown.
Unfortunately, the above efforts were not sufficient to cope with an even greater demand and, despite the engineering team’s efforts, the website experienced a degrading of performance. Even as our devops team increased the number of servers, it still could not handle the surge we experienced the second time around.
It was at this time we noticed that during the live stream, some users were able to access the map and buy LANDS through the website, while others were unable to participate natively through The Sandbox map.
In light of these events, The Sandbox decided to postpone the sale and focus on maintenance, as our intention was to let users be able to access and participate in the presale in an equitable manner.
Please note that during the few minutes it took to deploy new code halting the sale, 840 unique users — including 621 first time land owners (73%) — had been able to submit transactions for buying available LANDS and Estates. This is the highest number of unique buyers participating in one of our presales to date. This resulted in 81% of the round being sold out, generating over 14,318,282 $SAND in sales.
The Sandbox website has been taken out of maintenance and the full map is available, but without the ability to purchase the remaining 19% that will be released in the near future
The Road Ahead
We understand and empathize with our community regarding the equitable participation in LAND presales, and all aspects of The Sandbox ecosystem. This event has given us a clear direction to pursue the following:
1. Technical audits and bug fixing
Ahead of the presale, the technical team has been:
- increasing the number of servers of every part of the server architecture
- reducing the memory footprint of the whole map by 60%
- rendered asynchronous the loading of bundled assets among several optimisations
- running stress tests up to 2,000 concurrent users on several components of the frontend and backend
Still, a specific component of our system did not scale under the sudden peak of requests within seconds of opening the map and created the bottleneck that most users experienced. The CloudFlare CDN additionally applied its high traffic security and this resulted in loading issues for most.
The team worked round the clock to deploy fixes and test in just 1 hour and a half with these patches:
- Fixed a bug when SQL connections timed out
- Reviewed all CloudFlare routes (the CDN network that allows our site to scale)
- Enabled a connection pooling feature to avoid overloading the database
- Enabled CloudFlare cache purge script
However, not properly tested, the above fixes were not sufficient to cope with the load.
Our next steps are:
- deeper investigation of the root cause of the problem and fixing it
- add more scenarios and upgrade the various stress tests simulations, using the new data of yesterday’s events
- investigate different approaches to ease the load generated by presales, avoiding a situation when a high number of users and activity is concentrated in a short timeframe (see 3.)
2. Deposit 100% of the SAND raised in this LAND presale to the Foundation.
While we originally had planned to allocate 50% of the $SAND raised in the presale to the Foundation, this figure will now be raised to 100%, all 14.3M $SAND raised yesterday.
This means 100% of yesterday’s $SAND revenue will be invested in the Foundation to support Creators and Game Makers Fund, as well as the upcoming Play-to-Earn prize pools.
3. Redesigning the LAND Sales Experience.
We tried to find the model that would allow us to meet the exponential demand for LANDS and schedule them across several days (like the Moon Sale) or by offering more LANDS per event.
We have reached these limits too frequently and need to consider other options to stay true to our goal of equitable access for all.
As a result, we will be reworking the way LAND sales work using other systems such as Queuing mechanisms or Lotteries, where users will need to stake $SAND for a chance to win a lottery ticket to purchase LAND.
Other options will also be considered, involving the community on the decision. The Sandbox team will release more details about the next sale our updated sale system soon and updates on the 19% remaining LANDS of this round.
We are looking to rework the incentives for participants and the ways in which $SAND raised from these sales to greater benefits the Foundation and $SAND governance.
Closing Thoughts
We hope that this post serves as an apology for the inconvenience for all presale participants and a commitment towards transparency for all stakeholders. While we are thrilled to see that demand for LAND is constantly reaching new highs, this is a great opportunity for The Sandbox to address and amend the pain points that our community is experiencing.
We’d like to thank all those involved for their patience and support. We feel confident that distributing 100% of this round’s sale to The Foundation and designing new LAND sale systems will result in a net positive for The Sandbox ecosystem.
Our community is strong, solid, and built upon the right incentives — the ones to build together a new gaming virtual world. We’re growing together through both the great times and the bad times, but as we stick together this makes the strength of The Sandbox community
Please note that while LAND presales have probably been our most notable events to date, this is just a small portion of the forthcoming open metaverse. For those eager to find ways to get involved with The Sandbox, be on the lookout for updates regarding the Marketplace Launch in the coming weeks and future Play-to-Earn events in the coming months.
The Sandbox is offering a unique opportunity to build a gaming virtual world owned by Players; it is not a sprint but a marathon. We’re building it with and for the community, so your support matters.
Again, we wholeheartedly apologise to the many affected users.
For further questions, comments and concerns, please join The Sandbox Discord and a member of our team will get back to you as soon as they can.
