The Sandbox Gets Greener - Reducing The Carbon Footprint of NFTs By 99% And Regrowing Forests Across The Globe.

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The Sandbox

9 min readJun 29, 2021

The Sandbox announces that it will switch to Polygon’s Layer 2, reducing the carbon footprint of NFTs by up to 99%, as well as partnering with Offsetra and Nori on carbon offsetting, and working with WeForest to help reforestation efforts across the globe.

The Sandbox announced today several key commitments in reducing environmental impact:

New Efficient Technology: The Sandbox announced a partnership with Polygon and is migrating to a new eco-friendly NFT layer 2 technical solutions this summer that will use up to 100X less energy than Ethereum https://polygontech.medium.com/ee4d1e4f830d
Carbon Removal Offset: The Sandbox has begun acquiring carbon credits for reversing emissions with carbon removals via blockchain-based platforms, such as Nori and Offsetra, providing transparency on the compensation. The Sandbox has already calculated its carbon footprint associated with NFTs for 2021 to be equivalent to 350 tonnes of CO2 and acquired Carbon Credits. Check Nori Sandbox Certificate of Carbon Removal. In addition, The Sandbox also purchased 200 tonnes of nature-based CO2 offsets from Offsetra. You can visit The Sandbox’s profile page to view the impact and proof of certification.
Tree Growing: The Sandbox has renewed its partnership collaboration with WeForest, a forest restoration charity it previously partnered with in 2014 to plant nearly 9,000 Mangrove trees in Madagascar, and committed that for every hectare users buy of virtual LANDS in The Sandbox, 1% of proceeds goes to WeForest to protect and restore forests in Ethiopia, Zambia and Brazil. The Sandbox will engage with additional nature protection foundations in its ongoing efforts to make a real impact in the physical world.

In the meantime, The Sandbox has recently launched the beta for its Marketplace, allowing artists from the Artist Fund to monetize their NFTs. The Sandbox has pledged to reduce the number of minted NFT copies while improving the technical functionality of the Marketplace. To support the artists from the Artist Fund, NFT drop events will continue while waiting for the new environmentally-friendly technology to come online.

“The Sandbox is committed to building a vibrant and environmentally friendly ecosystem while fully supporting secure ownership for players and creators, creating new jobs, and offering economic opportunities,” said Sebastien Borget, COO and Co-Founder of The Sandbox. “As a pioneer in the blockchain gaming space, we’re taking steps to mitigate energy usage by up to 99% now, and will continue to look for additional technical solutions.”

Polygon integration

The Sandbox is and has always been about striving to provide the best experience for users interacting with our platform. As environment friendliness for NFT applications has always held a particularly important place for us, the decision to move to a layer 2 solution, such as Polygon’s, became evident.

Let’s take a look at where Polygon — with its Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism — ranks in terms of its ecological footprint.

As per estimates, the biggest Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains can consume a yearly quota of anywhere between 35–140 TWh of electricity, with a continuous draw of anywhere between 3–15 gigawatts (GW) of electricity. To scale this 1 GW could realistically power 300,000 homes, light up 110 million LEDs, or power Doc Brown’s Delorean to travel back to the future with 1,21 GW. That represents a lot of energy consumed.

By contrast, Polygon’s validators consume approximately 0.00079TWh of electricity yearly with an approximate continuous draw of 0.00009GW.

With The Sandbox set to integrate Polygon for the VoxEdit NFT (non-fungible token) builder for building voxel game assets, the Marketplace for buying and selling assets, and the Game Maker tool, the speed and gas cost efficiency of The Sandbox is going to massively improve.

Concretely, what does this implementation mean for The Sandbox? Transferring an NFT from one user to another would approximately equal sending an email; selling any type of NFT (ASSET, LAND, etc) will use less energy than it would take to stream a 2 hour-long movie, and buying a parcel of LAND would now be like doing 30 Google searches.

Under the new efficient technology powered by Polygon, NFT minting will generate less than 1% of the carbon emission that it currently produces on the standard Ethereum blockchain.

Carbon Credits

This commitment to addressing the environmental impact has led The Sandbox to partner with Nori, who was part of the 2019s Techstars Sustainability program.

Nori coordinates the creation and administration of carbon removal projects, starting with regenerative agriculture projects that store carbon in the soil thanks to the large co-benefits including water retention and improvements to soil health and quality. Through working with Nori, The Sandbox will be responsible for a number of Nori Carbon Removal Tonnes (NRTs), each NRT representing a tonne of CO2 removed from the atmosphere and stored in a terrestrial reserve. Check Nori Sandbox Certificate of Carbon Removal.

“The team at The Sandbox is paying attention. They see that this is not a zero-sum game; we can innovate in technologies like blockchain and take care of our environment,” said Alexsandra Guerra, Co-Founder of Nori.com. “The time when businesses define success only by the bottom line is now antiquated; we need to look at the double bottom line: profits and impact, as The Sandbox is doing.”

In addition, The Sandbox also purchased 200 tonnes of nature-based CO2 offsets from Offsetra. You can visit The Sandbox’s profile page to view the impact and proof of certification.

The Sandbox wants to set the standard for transparency and best practices in the world of NFTs and encourages a healthy discourse about the tools that can be used to reduce environmental impact and the uses of NFTs and blockchain technology.

200,000kg CO2 is equivalent to:

🍔 50,000 cheeseburgers

🐄 90 cows (annual emissions)

🚙 500,000 miles of driving (average passenger vehicle)

💳 15,698 Ethereum transactions.

“One of Offsetra’s co-founders, Damien Schuster, @damshoey, was one of the first LAND buyers,” said Andrew Bonneau, Carbon Markets Advisor at Offsetra. “Our team of crypto natives is thrilled to help The Sandbox reduce its emissions and help drive sustainability forward in unique metaverses like theirs.”

Reforestation

Tree Growing: The Sandbox is collaborating with WeForest, a tree-growing charity, once again. In 2014 the mobile version of The Sandbox and WeForest had already partnered to plant 9,000 Mangrove trees in Madagascar.

This time The Sandbox team is committing to donate 1% of the proceeds of its virtual LAND sales in 2021 to grow trees in carefully selected projects and only through trusted charity organizations that have expertise in the field. The Sandbox will engage with more foundations that center around nature protection to pursue its significant effort to make a real impact in the physical world.

You can track the progress on the WeForest website: https://www.weforest.org/partner/sandbox

The Sandbox is also considering other options that are currently in development if a more efficient technological solution were to appear.

As a pioneer in the blockchain gaming space, we’re taking steps to mitigate energy usage by up to 99% now, and will continue to look for additional technical solutions.

Those combined efforts will help The Sandbox to push its vision for an inclusive ecosystem further, providing users and brands a safe place to engage with a persistent ecosystem inside The Sandbox’s metaverse.

This announcement follows the announcements of major brands being involved with The Sandbox, supporting the ecosystem in a plethora of ways. Brands and partners include:

ATARI, deadmau5, Richie Hawtin, Zepeto, The Smurfs, Square Enix, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Shaun The Sheep, RTFKT, Care Bears, Binance, Coin Market Cap, Gemini, Avenged Sevenfold, Old Skull Games, CryptoKitties, as well as more than 100 additional brands…

Find more information on the The Sandbox on our Medium page: https://medium.com/sandbox-game

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/voxedit

Message us on Telegram: https://t.me/sandboxgame

Join our Discord channel: https://discordapp.com/invite/vAe4zvY

About The Sandbox

The Sandbox, a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, is one of the decentralized virtual worlds that has been fueling the recent growth of virtual real-estate demand. The Sandbox has partnered with major IPs and brands including Atari, Rollercoaster Tycoon, Care Bears, The Smurfs, Shaun the Sheep, and Binance, and expands their use in support of good causes. Building on existing The Sandbox IP that has more than 40 million global installs on mobile, The Sandbox NFT Metaverse will offer players and creators a decentralized and intuitive platform to create immersive 3D worlds and game experiences and to safely store, trade, and monetize creations through blockchain. For more information, please visit www.sandbox.game and follow the regular updates on Twitter, Medium and Discord.

About Animoca Brands

Animoca Brands, ranked in the Financial Times list of High Growth Companies Asia-Pacific 2021, is a leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, gamification, and artificial intelligence. Animoca Brands develops and publishes a broad portfolio of products including the REVV token and SAND token; original games including The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes; and products utilizing popular intellectual properties including Formula 1®, Marvel, WWE, Power Rangers, MotoGP™, and Doraemon. Animoca Brands’ portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships includes Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity), Dapper Labs (CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot), OpenSea, Harmony, Bitski, and Alien Worlds. Its subsidiaries include The Sandbox, Quidd, Gamee, nWay, Pixowl, and Lympo. For more information visit www.animocabrands.com or get updates by following Animoca Brands on Facebook or Twitter.

About WeForest

WeForest is a Belgium-based non-profit organization, which works with communities, local partners and NGOs to develop scalable reforestation projects mostly in tropical regions. Since 2009 they have positively impacted around 183,000ha, bringing 26,000ha under restoration and now (2021) have an installed capacity to reach 95,000ha or 100 million trees by 2024.

About Nori

Nori is a startup founded in October 2017 with the mission to enable global engagement for mitigating and reversing climate change via carbon removal. By providing a marketplace where anyone in the world can pay for and get paid for removing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide, Nori acts as a financial mechanism that will create new opportunities for climate innovation and carbon removal. Nori only focuses specifically on growing the financial incentive and supply of carbon removal (currently less than 5% of the supply in offset markets), and does not provide credits for mitigations or avoidances of carbon emissions (over 95% current offset supply). In addition to growing supply, Nori aims to scale access for demand to carbon removal credits using it’s API. With Nori’s API for carbon removal, customers of any goods and/or service provider can select to pay for carbon removal to negate the impacts of the product or service they are paying for, whether it’s shipping, manufacturing, or operation. Currently, Nori sources carbon removal by supporting farmers adopting regenerative agriculture projects that are sequestering CO2 from the atmosphere. In the future, Nori will enable various methods of carbon removal.

About Offsetra

Offsetra’s mission is to bridge the gap between climate finance and crypto by helping inform users of the carbon impact of their activities and through creating innovative means of raising climate finance. Offsetra’s work has led to the development of unique projects across the crypto space, including carbon footprint analysis of the Ethereum network, DeFi tools, and NFT partnerships. Offsetra’s team of climate experts curates a dynamic portfolio of carbon offset projects which deliver tangible social and environmental impacts alongside validated carbon reductions. Learn more about our mission and carbon reduction projects at Offsetra.com and our Ethereum emissions calculator at carbon.fyi.