The three most popular NFTs ( Non Fungible Tokens) ; SAND (The Sandbox), MANA (Decentraland), and RARI (Rarible) are the top three most popular projects in DeFi + NFT projects, and they are more representative successful applications of "NFT + Ecology". This article introduces and compares the three major projects in terms of basic concepts, team overview, cooperation and investment status, and project shortcomings.
1. Token Introduction
i. SAND (The Sandbox)
SAND is an ERC-20 functional token based on Ethereum in The Sandbox ecosystem, and is the basis for transactions and interactions. SAND is the main token in the system, and players, developers, and publishers all use it. The total amount of SAND is limited, with a circulation of only 3 billion, and its value increases over time. SAND also supports the EIP1776 protocol, which is still in the draft, to standardize local hyper-transactions, allowing users who use EOA wallets (such as Metamask) to trade without holding ETH. SAND has three core elements: editing software application VoxEdit, platform design trading market and game itself settings.
The Sandbox is a community-driven virtual gaming platform where creators can tokenize assets in the gaming experience. Game players can create digital assets (non-homogenized tokens, NFT) in The Sandbox Game Maker and upload them to the store. Players can create games by simply dragging and dropping, and they can play smoothly even without knowledge of programming. The Metaworld of The Sandbox consists of 166,464 LANDs. Land owners can hold competitions and events, use SAND to earn and create assets, tokenize assets and experience, vote in Metaverse Management, and participate in the decision-making of mutual platform upgrades. The platform not only provides players with platform games, but also allows users to create their own games. The Sandbox aims to attract more encrypted and non-encrypted game lovers through the advantages of real ownership, digital scarcity, profitability and interoperability of blockchain technology, and add interest to the blockchain.
ii. MANA ( Decentraland )
MANA is an Ethereum ERC-20 utility token released by Decentraland in 2017, which can be used to purchase virtual goods and services in LAND and Decentraland. MANA can also be used to pay for avatars, items, collectibles, and gambling and other entertainment activities. MANA's earning mechanism is an incentive for game developers to create and manage high-quality content. The supply of MANA is fixed, and MANA was burned after it was used to purchase LAND.
Decentraland is one of the oldest NFT projects. The platform is a virtual world where players can buy, build, and explore virtual structures, as well as social activities. Decentraland is a decentralized VR platform based on Ethereum. Users can fully control the content environment and applications they create, ranging from any static 3D scene to applications or games with more interactive functions. The limited and circulated 3D virtual space on Decentraland is called LAND, which is NFT using the ERC-721 protocol. LAND is identified by coordinates, and community members can use MANA to purchase it and have it forever. In addition, LAND can further organize and form themed communities, which is a shared space with common interests and purposes. In Decentraland, NFT stores are everywhere, some NFTs are only for display, while others can be purchased with MANA. Users can buy wearable devices on the Decentraland market, and the market will also sell hats, shoes, shirts, and land plots. In addition, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) allows users to participate in the creation and operation of the virtual world. In order to solve the expansion problem, reduce transaction costs, and increase transaction speed, Decentraland users can use Matic's Proof of Stake (PoS) sidechain, which is a Layer 2 expansion solution built for Ethereum (previously named Plasma) .
iii. RARI ( Rarible )
RARI is an ERC-20 governance token released by NFT digital collection and trading platform Rarible in July 2020. RARI integrates several hotspots of DeFi + NFT in 2020 , combining digital collections with agricultural income and mobile mining. Users who use the platform can get RARI agency governance currency as a reward. RARI mainly focuses on user-generated artworks, and uses NFT to provide proof of provenance to ensure the intellectual property rights of users' new artworks. In addition, RARI has improved the sales process and sales conditions in this market, reducing user costs to almost zero.
Rarible is an open source, non-custodial NFT trading platform for users to mint, sell, and create collectibles. It was launched in early 2020 by Alexei Falin and Alexander Salnikov. This community-managed market allows the most active creators and collectors to vote for platform upgrades and participate in management and review. Users can create coins and trade digital collectibles without any coding skills. The Rarible team stated that as platform users increase and the market expands, it plans to become a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in the future. The launch of RARI will be used to manage the development and decision-making of the platform. In addition, the Rarible team will obtain RARI through weekly distribution based on the user's weekly purchases and sales, that is, market liquidity mining (Marketplace Liquidity Mining). In December 2020, Rari Capital announced the migration of the liquidity of the Rari protocol to the Melon protocol to achieve the best balance of security, experience, and revenue.
From the perspective of the development trend, the market price, price of the three tokens and the price of Bitcoin all fluctuate greatly. But in comparison, SAND and MANA have recently shown an upward trend, while RARI has continued to decline.
From the perspective of token prices, RARI is much higher than SAND and MANA. However, from the perspective of total issuance and circulation, SAND and MANA are larger and more popular than RARI, and the trading volume, market value and market ranking of the former two far exceed the latter. However, despite its small scale, RARI has a strong momentum of development. It has a unique style and is extremely interesting and should not be underestimated.
From the perspective of the types of tokens, SAND and RARI, as an ERC-20 token, can be purchased and traded on cryptocurrency exchanges, just like other Ethereum. However, as an ERC-721 token, MANA is irreplaceable and indivisible. This will be the general trend in the development of future games and art collection games.
2. Team introduction
SAND’s publishing system The Sandbox has a senior team of 42 people, distributed in Argentina, France, South Korea and Japan. The core team of the ecosystem includes CEO and director Arthur Madrid, COO and director Sebastien Borget, CFO Marcelo Santurio, game inventor Pablo Iglesias and CTO Lucas Shrewsbury.
MANA's Decentraland core team has a good reputation in the fields of encryption technology, software engineering and venture capital. The team was founded by Esteban Ordano, a highly acclaimed software engineer at BitPay, registered at Metaverse Holdings Ltd and headquartered in Beijing, China. Ordano and other Decentraland team members such as project director Ariel Meilich, board members Manuel Araoz and Yemel Jardi created a blockchain-oriented hacker space, Voltaire, headquartered in Argentina.
Rarible is headquartered in Moscow and Alexei Falin and Alexander Salnikov are the co-founders of the Rarible NFT trading platform. Alexander Salinkov has more than 7 years of technical background and has also participated in some well-known encryption projects, including Humaniq.
3. Partners and investors
The Sandbox team, SAND’s publishing team, has established partnerships with more than 50 organizations. Cooperative organizations can develop content on their platforms, such as brands such as Shaun the Sheep, dApp game studios such as Dapper Labs (CryptoKitties), investors such as Square Enix (Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider), and ATARI (Rollercoaster Tycoon, Pong), etc. Iconic gaming company. These partners own virtual real estate in The Sandbox Metaverse, and will become one of the first companies to provide a multi-person social experience after and after the platform is publicly released. The team also reached a cooperation with Atari, aiming to further build the game with popular IPs such as Rollercoaster Tycoon, PONG and many other licenses. These projects will be launched in 2021. The latest available data shows that as of August 2020, The Sandbox has successfully obtained US$3 million in refinancing, led by Square Enix, B Cryptos, Mindfulness Capital, True Global Ventures (TGV) and others.
As one of the most experienced teams in the encryption field, MANA's release team Decentraland team has established cooperative relationships with multiple blockchain projects, such as Aragon, Coral, district0x, etc. Due to the timing of its birth and the help of the supporting institutions behind it, Decentraland has gained the enthusiasm of investors and the market during the ICO boom and successfully raised 25 million US dollars. Craft's data shows that as of October 2020, even if the Decentraland team is calculated at an annual cost of 3 million US dollars, the funds raised can almost cover the team's 10-year personnel expenditure.
The founder of RARI's release team, Rarible, said that its platform now cooperates with many NFT platforms, such as OpenSea. You can even find links to other sites on Rarible's website. In September 2020, Rarible announced that it had raised a fund in the Pre-Seed round of financing led by CoinFund. The specific amount was not disclosed. They stated that the funds will promote the development of community governance, the blockchain-based NFT market and the RARI governance token. CoinFund predicted in the blog post announcing the investment: “All digital content will become on-chain content”, emphasizing that “the types of online digital content in the form of NFT on the blockchain will be invincible.
4. shortcomings
The three major tokens also face their own problems in the development process.
The SAND platform The Sandbox encountered difficulties in the land sale in November 2020. For MANA, a significant problem currently facing Decentrland is the high transaction fee, which is also a common problem for every Ethereum application. RARI, as an open source and non-custodial trading platform, has the hidden dangers of using platform structural loopholes for Wash trading and false purchases of artworks to obtain RARI tokens, and the project is still in its early stages, and there is no white paper or roadmap , And now only supports token users of the Ethereum blockchain.
Conclusion
In general, the above three popular NFT tokens have a bright future with the continuous development of AR, VR technology and blockchain technology. Decentralized governance may also be the next trend. The next batch of successful projects will be those that hand over governance to users and are autonomous by the community. Of these three projects, which do you like best ?
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