SAND’s project—if you pull out its partnership roster, it’s enough to scare people. Gucci, Adidas, Playboy, the British Museum, Jurassic World, Terminator, Bruce Lee, Atari, Paris Hilton… pick any one and it’s an IP that could make headlines. Most first-tier brands are basically signed by it. In 2022 it was valued at $4 billion, and it even planned to raise another $400 million. So what happened? The coin price fell from 8.4 yuan to now—down more than 90%, to just over four tenths. The project’s market cap is barely over 100 million; compared to the original valuation, it’s shrunk by nearly 40 times.
The problem was never the partners—it was that people didn’t show up. Deals were signed, land was sold, and the games were made, but daily active users just wouldn’t take off—that’s the recurring weak spot they’ve been talking about for years. You can do 100 IP collaborations, but if nobody actually goes in and plays, it doesn’t matter. Now the team is pushing two paths: one is an AI creation tool that lets people make games just by describing them with words; the other is a mobile-game version rebuilt with the Unreal Engine, aiming to smash down the barrier to entry. The direction is right—when the “metaverse” story can’t be sold anymore, you need a different way of talking about it. Whether it will work is another question, but at least this time the goal is to “get people to actually come in and play,” not to sign yet another collaboration.
#SAND $SAND #SAND $SAND