Of Minecraft and blockchain Minecraft is an incredibly popular...

Of Minecraft and blockchain

Minecraft is an incredibly popular user generated world-building game acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion. It is not blockchain-based and does not have NFTs, but it is a good example of a user generated microcosmos.

Developer Mojang allows Minecraft users to develop any code they want for the game, as long as they make their code open source. Rather than attempt to monopolize the market, Mojang allowed users to freely develop content for Minecraft, which resulted in massive growth.

Roblox is a massively multiplayer online game creation platform that allows users to design their own games and play games designed by other players. It is sometimes described as “Minecraft meets the centralized content marketplace”. Roblox has provided abundant evidence that user generated content has the power and appeal to sustain a large economy: this year Roblox will pay out $70 million to its in-game content developers (many of them teenagers!).

Both Minecraft and Roblox, despite their remarkable successes and some degree of openness, are centralized ecosystems. We believe that a truly decentralized approach could absolutely revolutionize the game creation industry. And that’s a big part of why we bought Pixowl and its world-building game The Sandbox.

Why Pixowl and The Sandbox?

Recently, we acquired 100% of Pixowl. The reasons are legion.

Pixowl has an insanely talented team. The company is backed by some outstanding names, including my good entrepreneurial friend Martin Varsavsky. The founders of Pixowl, Arthur Madrid and Sebastien Borget, are recognized industry veterans with a thorough understanding of both the mobile games and the branded items spaces. Pixowl already works with world-class brands like Peanuts, Goosebumps, and Garfield, providing strong synergy with the business model of Animoca Brands.

But, most importantly, Pixowl and its founders have deep insight into blockchain and NFTs, and have already demonstrated that they know how to make great products. Add that up and what you get is leadership in cryptogaming.

The biggest game in Pixowl’s stable is The Sandbox, one of the largest independent user-generated content platforms and gaming ecosystems. It’s an innovative world-building game with 40 million downloads, one million monthly active users, and 57 million user generated worlds. Every day the players of The Sandbox create 100,000 new worlds and 25,000 new world elements.

The Sandbox is a great product, but it’s about to get even better: in 2019, a blockchain version of the game will be released. All of the myriad creations of its user base will exist on the blockchain, allowing us to explore the many opportunities unlocked by the use of non-fungible tokens.

As the user generated content of The Sandbox is tokenized, the content will become the platform.

For NFTs to succeed, you need an audience of creators - which The Sandbox has in spades.
The digital assets that players own in The Sandbox will be NFTs, which means that players will be free to do whatever they like with them - including selling or using them outside of the framework provided by the game.

Prolific creators in The Sandbox could be rewarded not just with entertainment, but also with real-world value when they sell or trade their creations.

And, of course, both Pixowl and Animoca Brands stand to benefit significantly from cross-audience opportunities in areas like market reach and monetization, among others.

The NFT creator and marketplace

The vision that Pixowl is working on for the upcoming blockchain version of The Sandbox is a decentralized, community-driven gaming ecosystem where creators can share and monetize game assets and experiences.

One of the key technologies that Pixowl is building is a non-fungible token creator which will allow anyone to create their own NFTs. These NFTs will have utility not just in The Sandbox but also in any other environment that utilizes Pixowl’s voxel-styled content editor.



In addition to content creation tools, The Sandbox will also need a place where creators can showcase and sell their content. That’s why The Sandbox is building an open online marketplace where virtual assets (published as NFTs) will be bought and sold.

This open market will allow for the free trade of in-game NFT assets between different platform users (not just users of The Sandbox).

In short, Pixowl is not simply building one of the first truly great blockchain games, but also tools and systems that will help to transform content into a platform, heralding the decentralized age of content creation, utilization, and monetization.

These are just some of the reasons that we acquired Pixowl and are bringing its highly talented and market-proven team into the Animoca Brands family. The vision and direction of both our companies are aligned, and the uncharted waters of blockchain gaming lie ahead, full of opportunities vast and wonderful.