We’re excited to announce that the Decentraland DAO has passed a $120,000 grant to fund SandStorm’s monthly metaverse builder contests. Our platform enables builders to mint assets from multiple virtual worlds to showcase their builds to brands. We couldn’t be more excited to expand into the Decentraland builder community further through this grant.
Over the last 3 months, we’ve seen a 125% increase in the number of Decentraland builders registering on our platform. We’ve seen such an increase that we acquired and begin development on a full 3×2 estate. This will soon be SandStorm’s social hub inside Decentraland’s virtual world. Our team has partnered up with an incredible group of metaverse builders from the platform to construct this first-of-its-kind estate. Similar to our social hub in The Sandbox’s virtual world we’ll stream from Decentraland to help with education and onboarding.
In the decentralized metaverse often virtual worlds like Decentraland are powered by DAOs. In short, to partner, you need to submit a compelling proposal that’s voted on by the community to receive funding. Given our rapidly growing Decentraland builder community on our platform, the proposal passed with 87% voting yes. Over 6,670,000 VP (1:1 VP to MANA for users) was submitted as a YES to the proposal. That is a whopping $5.2 million USD committed to the proposal as a YES to pass.
When we created the proposal we wanted to provide enough MANA funds for builders over the next 12 months. This is why we chose $10k in MANA per month, to give this initiative enough runway to show results. With the price of MANA being volatile, we decided to peg it to a USD amount. This helps simplify for builders entering the contests each month.
With our emphasis on education, the goal of these monthly contests is to help builders learn new skills. This is why as we release more virtual world partnerships our goal is to help coach builders with cross-world building. Many metaverse studios on our platform already have this skill set which is powerful for brands. Our goal is to increase that to 25% of our overall user base. The more cross-world building, the faster we can help grow the open metaverse for both brands and builders.
A key part of this $120,000 grant is that 100% will go to builders who participate in our monthly contests. We’ve seen studios and builders from all over the world generate a full-time income from participating. This has become a rewarding part of SandStorm, not only for our team but for the entire community of builders.
Our platform is establishing the overall open metaverse construction market across the top virtual worlds. This is projected to become an $8 trillion industry by 2030, which leaves a lot of room for growth. With that said, we have some extremely exciting platform releases coming over the next 60 days. We’ll continue rolling out our more partnership announcements and the format for DCL builder contests so stay tuned.
Supporting metaverse builders with this $120,000 grant from Decentraland is a big leap towards bringing the decentralized metaverse together. This grant will pave the way for our next virtual world partnerships to help push the metaverse construction market forward.
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