The Sandbox (SAND) recorded a brilliant week, even in the midst of the current, extreme market conditions, with Meta’s newly formed collaborative pledge setting the stage for the metaverse to shine as it gathered the signatures of 35 company CEOs. The value of The Sandbox (SAND) has spiked 44.4% over the last 7 days, while its competitor, the popular Ethereum blockchain game Decentraland (MANA), also scored gains of 17.9%.
Not Everyone Is Convinced by Meta’s Pledge
The official pledge, signed by giants like Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Meta, Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) and Sony (NYSE:SONY), outlines the aim of the Metaverse Standards Forum, which is stated as “to foster coordination and cooperation among the hundreds of companies currently jockeying to create the metaverse”. However, some of the established names in the crypto community have expressed their skepticism towards the purpose of the forum.
Danny Greene, the CEO of Meebits, said: “At the end of the day, we’re fighting for a decentralized future, and these are corporations that are representing shareholders’. The thoughts of The Sandbox Co-Founder Sebastien Bourget seem to align with this, as he assured the communtiy that he would never sell the platform to Mr. Zuckerberg’s corporation.
This will never happen.One Metaverse, Two Perspectives— Sebastien (@borgetsebastien) June 25, 2022
Indeed, there seems to be a thin line between collaboration and domination when it comes to IT giants, but there’s also the aspect of the two differently held perspectives of what the future of the internet looks like in the visions of the the “centralized” and “decentralized” indutries.
First of all, tech giants have repeatedly made reference to the creation of an “open and inclusive metaverse”, but many Web 3.0 enthusiasts think that the metaverse should be built on permissionless blockchains from the get go.
Secondly, big tech envisions the metaverse to be a place where they can keep all of their stored data, analytics and commercial assets under their own control, which indirectly implies the existance of a government within the metaverse.
While this naturally clashes with the widely-held ideals of a decentralized metaverse, the key term to remember here is “interoperability”. Indeed metaverse enthusiasts typically picture the metaverse as a place in which neighborhoods are owned by different companies with interconnected features, thereby making the transfer of digital assets a smooth, simple process, thanks to collaboration between multiple different “areas”.
mark zuckerberg entering the metaverse once it became a worldwide standard (2033, pictured) pic.twitter.com/JDsH0VQ2XXSAND & MANA on a Bullish Trend— pipca (@nescartridges) January 8, 2022
At press time, The Sandbox (SAND) is trading at $1.26—that’s 44.4% more than it was a week ago, and an impressive 568.2% year-t-date. Popular Ethereum blockchain game Decentraland (MANA) has also seen a 17.9% spike in its value over the last 7 days, and a whopping 109% since last year.
It can be fairly deduced from these stats that there is an increasing level of demand for blockchain gaming tokens, all while public interest in the metaverse is on the rise and at an all time high.