First published 17 August 2020. Trading had opened on 14 August. Expanded in October 2026 so a parcel is not described as SAND, and so a lock is not described as interest. The Sandbox is a game world where people publish scenes and items as NFTs. Animoca Brands owned the studio behind it. SAND is the token, an Ethereum token, with a cap of 3 billion. Ethereum without the jargon is the chain. ETH pays the fee. SAND does not. An NFT is a receipt, not a painting in a vault.
The public sale was a lottery on Binance, paid in BNB. It sold 360 million SAND, 12 percent of the cap, at 0.008333 dollars, for 3 million dollars. The project’s letter said the rest already existed even where it was not yet circulating. A price times 3 billion counts the uncirculated pile. A price times only the traded float does not. Unlocks of team and foundation tokens were coins that already existed.
LAND is the parcel, a different token, and the published map holds 166,464 of them. An estate is several parcels grouped. An item you made is a third token. Spending SAND to upload an item, to buy a parcel, or to play is a rule of the game. Sending SAND does not send the land. What is Decentraland (MANA)? is the neighbouring shape: a fungible token plus a map of NFTs.
The 2020 paper described staking SAND to earn more SAND from a fee pool, and a vote on grants. A lock that pays from a pool the project funds is not a savings account. Staking is a lock and a queue, not a savings account. This page will not walk through the lock. Later parts of the game have run on other networks. SAND on Ethereum is not a copy with the same name elsewhere. The wrong network is still the wrong city. Nothing here is an instruction to buy a parcel, to stake, or to buy SAND.
