In a statement The Sandbox has provided more details on the technical issues during yesterday’s disaster pre-sale, and stated that only 30% of the traffic was able to buy land. Extremely high demand caused the servers to fail, and the developers were not able to stop the transactions that passed through.
As a result of the server overload, 81% of the available land sold to only 840 unique users. The servers couldn’t handle the fact that five thousand users wanted to jump on the The Sandbox hype train. Despite the failing servers, the land sales won’t be reserved as they are now part of the Ethereum blockchain.
Whether the number of a 30% success rate for The Sandbox land acquisitions is correct, remains to be seen. When 840 users equals thirty percent, it would means that the servers were hit by 2800 total users. While the statement from The Sandbox clearly reads that ‘close to 5000 users simultaneously [were] looking to participate in the presale’. This would suggest that the success rate is only 13%. Oh well, those are just numbers. The fact is that the majority couldn’t reach the platform.
The Sandbox had 19.200 lands for sale, which means that these 840 users were able to buy 15.552 land parcels. That’s an average of 18.5 land parcel per user. According to the developers 621 buyers bought land for the first time, or at least used a new wallet. The remaining 19% of the land sale will be released in the near future. How this will work is not yet known.
The Sandbox issued an apology and will not claim any revenue from the pre-sale. Instead the money will be put in a community-driven and DAO-governed foundation. That’s more than 14 million SAND or 572 thousand dollars they put in community development. In addition The Sandbox promised to introduce more scalable and efficient sale mechanics in the future, like weekly sales, auctions or lotteries.
What is The Sandbox?
The Sandbox is one of the blockchain-powered virtual worlds currently in development. The beta test will launch later this year, but before that time there will be one more pre-sale. During this pre-sale gamers, businesses and investors can buy virtual land with a discount. If it works, obviously. And today it definitely didn’t work.
The virtual world of The Sandbox consists out of lands, and voxels fill up each of those lands. Visually it will remind many gamers of Minecraft, as both games have this Lego-inspired look to them. However, players are able to buy virtual land and implement any form of monetization. These virtual lands can become mini-games, adventures, virtual shops, extensions of actual webshops, a space for social gatherings, and so on.
The Sandbox is providing free tools for developers, gamers and content creators. Creators can use VoxEdit to make objects. In addition the Game Maker allows users to create interactivity on their virtual land. The Sandbox will also create a meta gaming experience. Players can for example do daily quests or weekly quests for their guild. This will earn players SAND, which they can sell or use to buy in-game items or virtual land.
