Zombie apocalypse show “The Walking Dead” has entered The Sandbox, a non-fungible token (NFT) metaverse.
Announced Thursday, The Sandbox, a Hong Kong-headquartered virtual world that allows users to monetize assets and game experiences via blockchains, NFTs and its native SAND token, is partnering with “The Walking Dead” creator Skybound Entertainment.
Gamers will be able create a horde of assets to combine with their favorite “Walking Dead” characters. The idea is for users to recreate comic book storylines or to forge their own original adventures, the companies said.
Metaverse experiences like The Sandbox and Decentraland have seen adoption rocket with the advent of NFTs. The Sandbox co-founder Sebastien Borget said the advent of digital cats on the Ethereum blockchain – CryptoKitties, the NFT sector’s first smash hit in 2017 – signalled a paradigm shift.
Said Borget:
“We immediately saw the potential to apply that technology, not just to create virtual cats, but to enable anyone to make their own NFTs, exchange them with other users, monetize them on the marketplace, and use them to build games and be rewarded for the time they spend on the platform.”
As well as providing no-coder game creation tools, The Sandbox is composed of a map of parcels of land for sale. There are some 166,464 plots of digital land in total, each an individual NFT, and there will never be more, Borget explained.
“Unlike Decentraland, which sold its entire map at the beginning, we are selling progressively,” Borgat said. “Today we have sold 52% and we should have land for sale until about the end of 2021.”
“The Walking Dead” joins over 160 existing partnerships in The Sandbox, including those with Deadmau5, Richie Hawtin, “The Smurfs,” Atari and CryptoKitties. The Sandbox is scheduled to launch its first public alpha for players this summer.