The retail giant Carrefour announced on Monday the acquisition of more than 36 hectares of land, the equivalent of around thirty of its supermarkets, or fifty football fields. Let’s make it clear from the outset: this operation took place within The Sandbox, a platform considered to be one of the parts of the metaverse, this set of interconnected worlds on which the digital giants have been eyeing for a few months, Meta (ex-Facebook) in mind. So it’s only virtual.
The investment made technically via the purchase of an NFT (non-fungible token), nevertheless remains on a human scale: Carrefour paid around 300,000 euros for the plot (or LANDS) 33,147 of The Sandbox. A beautiful building, in the city or in the countryside. A straw, it is true, for this giant with a turnover of 78.6 million euros in 2020, and interested in agreements of a completely different scale; a merger with Auchan currently has the business world in turmoil.
Carrefour does not expand much more on its motivations. “Innovation is at the heart of our model”, tweeted its CEO, Alexandre Bompard, who has already expressed his desire to become the world leader in “digital retail”. Can buying a good in the metaverse help him?
A “real estate” opportunity
In principle, The Sandbox allows its players to create, own and monetize their virtual gaming experiences, all on the Ethereum blockchain. His world is divided into a multitude of plots to visit … and to buy, to affix what you want. The main competitor of The Sandbox in this sector is called Decentraland. The two platforms also receive a percentage on each of the sales made in the field. Here lies the first interest of the metaverse. Investing in the “stone” of tomorrow.
Carrefour first seized an opportunity, because the value of the land is already the subject of strong speculation. Their number is limited: 90,000 precisely for Decentraland, a few thousand more The Sandbox, as well as their sizes. And not only by these two criteria. “These universes are built like cities, with avenues, streets, lakes, and a central square. So the prices are aligned according to the distance from amenities or axes. The closer you are to the central square, the more your land is expensive, because more people will be walking around with their virtual reality headset. If you are not there, you will have to invest in advertising on these same places, in order to attract users to your place”, explains Arnaud Groussac, founder of Patrimoine Store, a wealth management consulting platform specializing in classic real estate. He himself bought a small plot on Decentraland for around 12,000 euros. Twenty-five times less than Carrefour’s investment, which was made in a context of a falling cryptocurrency market, allowing it to get its hands on its land at a competitive price.
The company very involved in the cryptocurrency industry, Republic Realm, which strongly believes in the development of the metaverse, recently put on the table 4.3 million dollars in order to acquire a LANDS in the “fashion district from The Sandbox. One of the most rated. Another company, Tokens.com, has invested over $2 million in a piece of Decentraland land. “It’s like buying a piece of land in Manhattan 250 years ago when the city was being built,” commented its CEO, Andrew Kiguel, enthusiastically.
All transactions are recorded in the blockchain, making it possible to limit the purchase-resale at high capital gain. This makes the system relatively stable. Enough to build a building, a shop? Yes, because these pixels are “buildable”. There is a limit, however: “You can’t make as many floors as you want, for example, and to build, you must first file a construction NFT”, explains Arnaud Groussac. A bit like if you had to validate a building permit.
Map of The Sandbox
Screenshot
A duel of metaverses
The Sandbox currently claims over 12,000 different owners. A few big well-known brands, like Adidas, Atari, and now Carrefour, but also a myriad of smaller players like Arnaud Groussac. All with one thing in common: having something to sell. Which seems logical: at the price of land, the interest for private individuals is almost zero. “If you have nothing to offer, there is not much point in building a simple house”, according to Arnaud Groussac. The Sandbox is not The Sims, this famous saga of video games, specializing in life simulation.
But it’s not a supermarket. There is indeed a “story” mode, a video game interest in the game. As well as other experiences. Artists can also decide to hold concerts and events there, such as the American rapper Snoop Dogg, owner of a virtual mansion (similar to the real one) on The Sandbox, and who recently invited guests with NFT to attend an event at his home. The purchase of a plot preserves before this commercial, marketing interest. “It is, as the metaverse seems to promise, to make places or experiences accessible to people wherever they are on the planet”, thinks Arnaud Groussac, who would like to schedule meetings in the future. directly its building of the metaverse.
For Carrefour, the form of its involvement in the metaverse remains to be determined. The retail giant, however, rejected the idea of reproducing its own stores identically, evacuating this dystopian vision of dragging its shopping cart through highly pixelated shelves. The Carrefour Taiwan branch had already tested this possibility in the “Animal Crossing” game, in the summer of 2020. Elodie Perthuisot rather talks about “events, product launches”, with the Figaro. Without being very specific. “Our strategy is to be at the heart of emerging trends to understand them and not have to react to them later,” she acknowledged.
“Nobody knows what will become of the metaverse, or even what will become of The Sandbox in a few years, so the best way to try to find out is to test what already exists”, also notes Gilles Maury , senior manager at TNP-Consultants, at L’Express. Carrefour is aware of this. The French giant also has a partnership with Meta…carrying a completely different competing vision of the metaverse centralized around its codes, its advertising rules. Far from The Sandbox, based on a decentralized system, and in which Sébastien Borget ensures that no landowner has more than 1% of the map.
One unknown remains: will these experiments have value? Meta has the weapons to finally impose its visions and break the real estate market launched by The Sandbox and Decentraland. Then, with 1.6 million users, The Sandbox community remains infinitely limited compared to other worlds under construction, which limits the scope of marketing or event operations that can be carried out there. A far cry from the 150 million Minecraft users, the 200 million Roblox, and the 350 million players on Fortnite, in which a juggernaut like Nike preferred to bet to build a space, for example. All three are also considered gateways to the metaverse. At 300,000 euros, Carrefour still took its ticket. “Everything is still very confusing, experimental, but a lot of innovative technologies, such as NFTs, are converging towards this goal of a metaverse. This also carries value: anyone can be there, which breaks a lot of boundaries Basically, this idea of the metaverse is intoxicating for brands, and opens the door for them to creativity and to ways of interacting and paying that they have not necessarily had the opportunity to experiment so far”, continues Gilles Maury. A real sandbox, in short. It is also the literal translation of The Sandbox.