There are easily over 1 million Minecraft builders who have been creating assets for years all over the world. The level of time and energy it takes to build an experience in Minecraft is substantial but yet there isn’t a clear way to monetize that hard work, until now.

Fortunately for Minecraft builders, the decentralized metaverse powered by NFTs now makes it possible to generate a full-time income from their building skills. We’ve had powerful conversations with hundreds of Minecraft builders in our community along with brands who’ve built in Minecraft over the years, so we wanted to help usher in a new era of builders into web3.

With that being said, why is an NFT-powered virtual world important to be part of as a Minecraft builder? Here are three of our top reasons:

1. Ownership. When you spend days or even weeks building an experience in Minecraft YOU DO NOT OWN any of those assets or the end experience regardless of how it’s messaged. Minecraft (Microsoft) owns that work and all those assets. When you don’t fully own the rights to something like a digital good it can be taken away from you. This is why terms like “centralized” and “permissionless” are used in the web3 community so often. You do not need permission to transact with what you own in the decentralized metaverse on the blockchain. So, in order to truly OWN your hard work, migrating your build skills to a virtual world on the blockchain like The Sandbox, Decentraland, or NFT Worlds is vital.

2. Skillset overlap. If you’ve spent years building in Minecraft you’ve learned how to craft amazing creations using different tools for different assets. This is the same logic being used for builders in the decentralized metaverse. You have a special building software for each virtual world that helps you create your unique assets while adding animations which results in a few really cool file formats options. For Sandbox, you simply create your assets in VoxEdit (their custom-build software) and upload them directly to the game known as MINTING once you’re done. With the SandStorm platform, taking it a step further, once you’ve created your masterpiece, you’ll simply export your experience in one of our supported file formats and “MINT” it using Metamask on Polygon or Ethereum. This work will be discovered by brands who will want to work with you on bringing their business into the decentralized metaverse.

3. Monetization. With true ownership through NFTs, you’re able to directly sell to buyers as a Minecraft builder now thanks to blockchain and NFTs. For example, if you created a nightclub and minted all the asset files you created on the SandStorm platform, brands can discover and potentially bid/buy directly from you. These assets are being sold directly to the buyer as peer to peer from your wallet to theirs. This monetization strategy is extremely scalable for you as a builder. In addition to creating and then selling the files minted on our platform, you can join plenty of metaverse events to sell your awesome NFTs, as well as participate in our builder competitions every month to sharpen your skills. Over the last 3 months in 2022, we’ve partnered with Sandbox enabling builders to win 10,000 SAND per month ($30,000 USD)

On top of these three key reasons to migrate your Minecraft or Roblox building skills to the decentralized metaverse, there is a deep importance to be positioned for the future. Brands all over the world are joining the metaverse NOT because it’s “trendy” but because they know virtual goods and services are the future for GenZ and GenAlpha.

As Wayne Gretzky once said ““I skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

At SandStorm, we believe metaverse builders will be in higher demand than web 2 software developers. Software developers skyrocketed in market value to help bring brands onto the internet (web 2.0) with basic 2D websites in the late 90s and early 2000s. Now with voxel, blender, and many other 3D building skills, they’re the developers positioned to bring brands into web 3.0 through virtual experiences.

To learn more about how to mint your first assets on SandStorm to get discovered by brands entering the metaverse check out this post

Also If you want to join the conversation join 5,000 humans on Discord