This was a milestone year for The Sandbox, marked by two Alpha Seasons, a wave of new content, groundbreaking partnerships, platform upgrades, and the announcement of The Sandbox 3.0. 

We continued to add exciting partners to our platform, like Bruce Lee and Cirque du Soleil—the headliner of Alpha Season 6—and continued to serve our community by giving them greater direct ownership of our platform, allowing Creators to step into the spotlight and take a leading role in content creation. We released 10 Avatar Collections with brands like Atari, Attack on Titan, and King Kong of Skull Island, offering more ways for the community to express their fandom while improving our Marketplace to enable more seamless transactions. And, we hosted several exciting events, both in-person and on our platform, bringing our community together in meaningful ways. 

These achievements are only the beginning. Enter The Sandbox today and read more about the past year below.

Two Seasons in One Year

We hosted two Alpha Seasons in one year, with over 144,000 players participating worldwide, collecting over 200,000 NFTs, and completing over 7.9 million quests.

Alpha Season 5 included over 40 unique Experiences and over 150,000 hours of gameplay. Anchored by Jurassic World, we saw content from over 20 top brands, including Terminator: Dark Fate, King Kong of Skull Island, and Casio G-SHOCK, alongside fan-favorite user-generated content. We delivered a new format with diverse adventures, challenges, and $1 million USD in rewards! This six-week event saw an average playtime of 97 minutes, with Jurassic World: Dinosaur Preserve, the Alpha Season 5 Hub, Chupa Chups City, and Deepak Chopra: Meditation Oasis emerging as the most frequented Experiences. We also introduced three exciting new Abilities—Fly, Double Jump, and Air Dance—that allow players to travel more quickly and efficiently.

But we didn’t stop there. In an effort to deliver more frequent Seasons to our players, we launched Alpha Season 6, featuring Cirque du Soleil! Season 6 included 30 unique Experiences and surpassed 100,000 hours of gameplay. We saw content from over 24 top brands, including Casio G-SHOCK, Terminator: Dark Fate, and King Kong of Skull Island, as well as the return of Alpha Season 5 favorites, such as Jurassic World and Cheech & Chong. We added Experiences that utilized two new Abilities, Dash and Glide, and 16 Experiences that incorporated the new Save Data feature, allowing players to leave and return to their favorite games without losing any progress.

These two Seasons demonstrated the continued engagement of The Sandbox community, with players exploring diverse worlds, mastering new Abilities, and earning rewards across a rapidly expanding ecosystem. Looking ahead, we remain committed to delivering richer Experiences, more frequent Seasons, and even greater opportunities for players to shape the metaverse.

Product Updates

Features like Dash, Glide, and Save Data wouldn't be possible without the two major upgrades to Game Maker and Game Client. The 0.11 and 0.12 updates added several additions to the Creator toolbelt, making it easier than ever to build Experiences. 

We redesigned the Game Maker to give Creators more flexibility and freedom when creating multiplayer games and allowed Creators to choose between single and multiplayer Experience design; a huge leap forward for our platform. Upgrades to multiplayer also included easier setup, matchmaking lobbies, quickplay, Team Scores, Multiplayer-Friendly NPCs, and Broadcast Target Selection, which allows Creators to transform how rule logic influences gameplay.  

Persistent Progress via Saved Data updates enables deeper gameplay, allowing players to pick up where they left off, even between Experience updates. This allows for a myriad of new mechanics, such as in-game stores with persistent currencies, level systems that track and reward growth, progression trees and unlockable content, and save states that persist across gaming sessions and version updates. 

Our vision of uniting brands and Creators leaped forward with an expanded Asset Library and enhanced tools, while competitive multiplayer racing entered the fold thanks to improved mechanics. Refined Character, Camera, and Controls (the 3Cs), elevated team-based gameplay, platforming, and racing, all while streamlining the creative process so anyone can build, play, and connect in The Sandbox. The platform itself underwent feature upgrades, including Customizable HUDs, easily accessible Control Screens for game inputs, and optimized performance to improve gameplay and reduce load times. 

Additionally, we continued to build upon our library of Templates, making it easier for Creators to hit the ground running. Across both updates, we added the following game types: Tag, Trivia, Idle Clicker, Crash, Social Platforming, Shooter, Action RPG, and Business Tycoon.

Our award-winning sound team also rolled out an advanced audio system powered by WWise, the industry-standard audio engine used in many leading AAA games.

Together, the 0.11 and 0.12 updates marked a significant evolution for our platform as it continues to grow and empower Creators with new tools, mechanics, and platform enhancements while elevating the player experience. 

Meeting Our Community IRL 

We continued to engage our community at in-person events this year, both large and small.

The year kicked off with our presence at NFT Paris in February, bringing together creators, web3 enthusiasts, and artists from across the greater European region to interact with our brand in meaningful ways. From an immersive booth with real-time LAND bidding to voting on live SIPs, our community was able to meet with and connect with The Sandbox team. We hosted a side event with Mocaverse and concluded the multi-day conference with a party featuring our partner Agoria.  

We continued strengthening our presence at major industry events with more close-knit community-focused activations at ETHDenver, the Animoca Frens Network House in Dubai, and a private dinner at Boulevard during GDC, where we discussed the future of gaming. These intimate events gave us a chance to connect more closely with different groups of our community. 

In June, we attended NFT NYC to announce our partnership with Cirque du Soleil, bringing our virtual world to life with a two-day event featuring live acts from a Cirque du Soleil performer, talks from Co-founders Arthur Matrid and Sebastien Borget, and side events for both press and brand partners, as well as the wider Web3 community. 

The year concluded with our presence at TOKEN2049, where we announced SANDchain at SandHouse, a warm, penthouse-inspired gathering designed as a retreat from the conference’s fast pace. Developed with support from The Sandbox DAO and hosted alongside partners including Animoca Brands, Anichess, and W3GG, the event brought 300 members of our global community together for an afternoon of connection, conversation, and creator showcases. 

As we continue expanding globally through partnerships, creator programs, and community-driven initiatives, in-person events highlight how our platform is continuing to bring people together.

Content Expands with More Brands on the Platform 

2025 was a year full of new content for The Sandbox community, with releases that brought beloved franchises, music icons, and cultural moments into The Sandbox. Highlights include Ubisoft’s Champions Tactics, ATEEZ, Jurassic World Eggs, AvATARIs, Lord Krishna, The Smurfs, Casio G-SHOCK Droids, Cirque du Soleil, King Kong, and Chupa Chups. These drops allowed players to collect, play, and engage with some of their favorite cultural touchstones like never before.

Beyond these releases, the year also featured transformation events and dynamic experiences across the platform. Crash! brought players into high-stakes action as part of the Traffic Crime Investigation team, and the British Museum came to life in Heroes vs. Creatures, letting players transform into Heracles or Medusa in a battle for glory and rewards. Hell’s Kitchen returned with a fresh Gordon Ramsay Avatar, offering Avatar Owners an updated look, while Terminator Human vs Machines let players choose sides in a post-apocalyptic battle. Each of these events brought unique gameplay mechanics and immersive storytelling, keeping the world of The Sandbox constantly fresh and engaging for our player base.

The Future of UGC Empowerment

This year marked a defining shift toward a creator-first future in The Sandbox, as we laid the foundation for a platform where Seasons are shaped directly by the community. We introduced a new content model in which Game Jams will be the backbone of every Season, with each new Season populated with at least 20 new UGC creations. To better support our expanding UGC ecosystem and marketplace, we refined our reward and support systems. We reimagined our Game Jam structure to elevate quality and provide Creators with more opportunities than ever, including larger SAND pools, polishing grants, and guaranteed Season placements for standout experiences. 

We hosted over 20 contests across Game Maker, VoxEdit, and Avatar design, including four City Builders, which led to more than 400 new Experiences, 376 assets developed in the VoxEdit contests, and over 100 submissions to the Avatar design content. We also sent 10 sets of equipment to our 35,000 Avatar Owners and 9,000 LAND Owners for a total of 489,000 NFTs distributed via the monthly reward program.

In our push to empower Creators, we also launched the Community Avatar Design Contest, inviting Creators to design an Avatar using any medium they liked, from VoxEdit to hand-drawn art to fully crafted models. The contest empowered creators of every skill level to bring their own characters into The Sandbox, with the top ten winners collaborating directly with our teams to turn their designs into real, collectible Avatars that formed the first-ever Community Collection. With over 100 participants, the contest drew a wave of imaginative, platform-ready submissions that will be unveiled in 2026.

Even our yearly holiday celebration, “Season’s Greetings,” has been adorned with rewards created in partnership with 13 artists from our community. Our first-ever Advent calendar brings daily surprises and festive fun to The Sandbox throughout the month of December. We also hosted our third Builders’ Challenge. For over four weeks, The Builders’ Challenge 3 inspired Creators worldwide to design and publish nearly 500 original Experiences. With participation from Creators in more than 50 countries, Builders’ Challenge 3 rewarded Creators with both visibility and meaningful earnings. 

As we look to the new year, Creators lead the way in crafting the worlds, stories, and characters that define our platform.

Expanding The Sandbox Ecosystem

This year, we unveiled our most ambitious platform update yet with The Sandbox 3.0, outlining how we’re preparing to build the leading global distribution ecosystem for digital culture and IP, connecting brands, creators, institutions, and creators worldwide for the next wave of Creator innovation powered by the convergence of Web3 and AI. As our ecosystem passed 400,000 creators and 8 million users, we’re focused on strengthening the tools and infrastructure that support them, all powered by SAND. 

We’ve begun rolling out new AI initiatives that improve internal efficiency and unlock user-facing creation, including custom generative models trained on our library of 1.7 million assets.

We’ve also announced our partnership with Rosebud AI, providing creators with new ways to “vibe code” games using The Sandbox templates and content, allowing them to guide a large language model with natural language prompts to generate code aligned with their desired style or gameplay experience rather than technical syntax. These steps marked the beginning of a larger push to make creation faster, more accessible, and more expressive for builders at every level.

We also moved mobile development forward through internal playtests, with the next planned step being a larger-scale closed playtest for select members of our community. And saw the ecosystem expand into new Web3 initiatives, including SANDchain, Corners, and more to come next year.  

Announced at TOKEN2049 in Singapore, SANDchain is a new Layer 2 network designed to make transactions faster, more scalable, and more affordable for creators. Using SAND, SAND Points, Creator Points, and Creator Tokens, SANDchain connects creators, fans, and rewards within a single onchain ecosystem. With the testnet now live, and the mainnet planned for 2026, it’s already helping creators monetize engagement, grow communities, and participate in a transparent digital economy.

We’ve also begun to roll out Corners, a first-of-its-kind free-to-use curation platform where users can coin, create, and share collections of internet content. By turning curation into creation, Corners gives creators fresh opportunities to showcase their tastes, connect with audiences, and earn rewards, expanding the ways they can engage within The Sandbox ecosystem alongside the Game, DAO, and SANDchain. Supporting the launch of Corners allows The Sandbox to broaden its ecosystem beyond gaming and into a broader distribution network of culture while introducing new utility and monetization opportunities for the $SAND token. 

The Sandbox DAO strengthened its role in community governance and creator support this year, with 20 SIPs passing through community vote, including major proposals such as NFT collection management, Magic Realms, LAND Sales Estate, and continued funding for the grant program. Delegation became more concentrated, with 3,500 votes cast. The DAO committed 630,000 USDC overall, awarding 38 grants and distributing 200,000 USDC to Creators across 20 countries, helping expand innovation and global participation throughout our ecosystem.

$SAND remains the anchor to our ecosystem, providing the economic foundation that powers The Sandbox Game, The Sandbox DAO, SANDchain, and Corners. While remaining a consistent top-five token in the GameFi space over the past five years, each of our new initiatives will build upon the financial rails of $SAND, adding more utility and value as we meaningfully expand the breadth and depth of our ecosystem.  

What’s Next

While 2024 set the stage, 2025 advanced our vision even further. 

Guided by The Sandbox 3.0, we’re building a global distribution ecosystem of culture and IP that connects people, brands, creators, institutions, and consumers worldwide. Anchored by SAND as the foundational economic layer, we continue to expand into new products, platforms, and systems, creating more opportunities for ownership, play, and creativity.

As we move into 2026, we remain focused on growing our ecosystem, supporting creators, and bringing more communities into The Sandbox, where culture, innovation, and imagination meet.