Will Sandbox and Decentraland make a comeback?

Each crypto cycle produces its own themes and trends, which often determine which projects receive more attention than others. In the bull run of 2017, there was a strong focus on so-called initial coin offerings (ICOs), a method of raising capital for new cryptocurrency projects in which tokens are sold to investors before they begin trading. The recent bullrun has seen the metaverse take center stage, with flagship projects such as Sandbox and Decentraland. Today these projects have been somewhat forgotten, what happened?

The emergence of trends is a dynamic that few people fully understand. Companies from all over the world invest enormous amounts of money in research and trend analyzes in order to identify early on which topics will be relevant for the market. A suitable example of this is Facebook: The company recognized the vision of the Metaverse and invested over 100 billion US dollars in the development of its own virtual reality platform. Mark Zuckerberg was so convinced of this idea that he renamed the company Meta.

The trend towards the Metaverse was further strengthened by the NFT boom. Dominant brands and companies started NFT campaigns and acquired virtual land in metaverse projects such as Decentraland and Sandbox. Such institutional influx into this topic and the mainstream adoption of NFTs has had a huge impact on the crypto space. Interestingly, NFTs like the successful CryptoPunks project have existed since 2017, although their popularity only increased in 2021.

The price development

With the hype around Meta and NFTs, Metaverse projects became the most lucrative investments of 2021. Decentraland launched in August 2020 at a price of just five cents and rose to $5.90 within a year, an increase in value of over 100x. The price of Sandbox’s SAND token developed similarly, from around 0.60 cents to just under 9 US dollars.

However, the end of the bull run brought with it some hard realizations. It became apparent that people were apparently not yet ready to live and work in a virtual world. NFTs experienced a significant decline and have seen virtually no significant price recovery so far. There was suddenly neither interest nor use in non-fungible tokens, for which millions had previously been paid.

The Metaverse of Meta suffered Losses worth billions, which forced the company to rethink its strategy. The trend of the Metaverse came to a halt, and the prices of Decentraland and Sandbox corrected by 95 and 97 percent, respectively.

Is a comeback possible?

2021 definitely proved to be too soon for the Metaverse, but the future remains open. Investors and companies hoped for more progress in Metaverse development and will be more cautious about future investments. Looking at current trends, it seems clear that the focus is now more on AI tokens and the tokenization of real-world assets. If the Metaverse theme makes a comeback, more attention will likely be focused on projects like Decentraland and Sandbox, albeit partly in connection with new projects.