Another question I have for both submissions is, do you have a portfolio in which we can reference from?
If you could also provide us with a video to visualise how some of the key mechanics work thatād be great. Even if you are using Microsoft Paint or a piece of paper, or anything.
Thanks!
Here are my thoughts:
Alex and Joseph have done more for the Sandbox than 99.9% of human beings. All things being equal they get my vote any day.
That said when I look here my initial take is a team of one developer for $200k vs a professional team with experience with top crypto companies for $60k. I feel much more comfortable going with the latter.
I think the features that the Council team proposed are also cooler, but I have questions about how reasonable it is to deliver them. This access pass thing, since when can we just mint 10M access passes? Presumably they need to be a Sandbox NFT to gain access to LAND which would be prohibitively expensive. Additionally, there is only one dev, does he have Solidity experience to be able to secure such large quantities of money?
Very open to having my mind changed, but I will have to go with the more professional team otherwise.
Just saw Alexās edit, that the team is 3-4 developers. That makes me feel better, but yeah cost still seems high. If I could hear an explanation of the 10M pass mint that would help convince me.
Here are a few comments on portfolio/examples:
You can find a draft of our portfolio here: WakeUp Labs Featured Projects. We know itās not perfect, but it gets the job done.
Recently, weāve been also creating high-quality landing pages. While weāll have more examples with clients soon, I believe this one is a good representation of our work: Empresa WinWin. (Our new website is also currently in development).
Before completing Milestone 1, it will be challenging to have a solid prototype up and running, as weāll need to allocate time to plan for it. The references weāll rely on will be similar to those outlined by The Sandbox DAO team, which I believe serve as a good north star. From there, we can iterate based on feedback from the rest of the DAO.
Hi @Gonzacolo,
What aspects of the productās iteration are unclear at this stage?
What are the potential variations in the productās iteration that would significantly impact maintenance needs?
How significant would the budget increase be for a two-year maintenance period? Can we quantify that?
I appreciate you taking the time to address these questions.
Hi @KamiSawZe,
Iāve read The Council Proposal on Google Docs and have a few questions to help me better understand it.
Thanks in advance for your patience in answering these.
Something to consider, if weāre diving into the differences between both projects:
Our proposal, as it compares with the other, offers a stronger potential for earning for the DAO, and a stronger potential for earning from developers in the Sandbox ecosystem. This is a major driver of both the costs and the profitability, but in the end we consulted with the internal Website (Dashboard) team at The Sandbox to ensure that we have the best understanding of scope we possibly could.
Adapting the Sandbox API for real-time data sharing as part of the extended goals means working with team leads (as seen in our consultation) to have open pull requests that are otherwise not available to the public. We can leverage our excellent history with teams we often work with in both real-life events and/or work remotely with every day.
As mentioned in the budget allocation areas of the paper, we have a dedicated āas much as 50% of bottom-line Gross revenueā to marketing your games. Using my RAB Marketing experience in Digital and Radio advertising, we will create Copy for marketable events and promotion of experiences inside the Sandbox ecosystem, which will flow through our portal.
The Sandbox Game manages all server-side allocations for new user acquisition and games/experience services. Our website uses dynamic traffic management through Vercel, which has been a strong and proven service which we use for all other web functions.
As we fulfill the MVP requirement, our team will be focused on the promotion and marketability of the in-demand feature of Minting āAccess Passā assets. Quite different from Assets or Arts built in VoxEdit, these Access Pass assets can be minted in the hundreds of thousands of units, and will be used as a modern CD-Key for developers to be able to sell access to their LANDs. This feature has been missing as a monetization option for Game/Experience Developers in TSB, and with this solution will present a much higher demand for Development on the platform. This will also build a strong pipeline for new players to enter the space, as it will become more viable for studios to create higher quality products with more expensive development and marketing ā now that they have a more traditional way to make money in the Gaming space.
Software development costs differ significantly across countries, influenced by various factors such as labor markets. It might be beneficial if the SandboxDAO could provide a benchmarking guide for the range of development costs to serve as a reference.
Thank you for sharing these proposals. I like that we have two very different options to consider, though I was hoping for more proposals before we move to voting.
Iāve read both and clearly there are big differences in vision, experience, and budget. The Council brings experience, its work with TSB, and strong community roots, while WakeUp Labs brings technical skills and a better budget. That said, both proposals focus on delivering the MVP without additional features.
@Geraldine question please, on ROI: If additional features require more funding, does the ROI from the first round of financing need to be achieved before requesting a second round? How does that process work?
@TheVisionEx Thank you for the proposal, I have a few questions if you could please help with, thanks in advance!
How many developers will be working on this? The proposal mentions one developer at 1400 SAND/day for 90 days (plus 10 part-time days), but in a different spot, it mentions a team of 3ā4 people. If we assume the minimum (3 developers x 30 days x 1000 USD), that already comes to 180K USD.
I didnāt fully understand the Access Pass idea. You mentioned these arenāt assets made in VoxEdit but require Universal Catalysts. Are these passes essentially an JPEG/NFT to gate our experiences? how do they work?
The revenue estimates a 10 million SAND in sales per developer, which I think is very high, what benchmarks did you use to estimate it at that?
Will TSB branded merchandise be the only option, or will the community also be allowed to design and sell items? Also, the 1ā3% revenue to the DAO, since TSB owns the logos, would this revenue go to TSB rather than the DAO, or that is a different royalty deal?
I think the user and developer estimates are a bit high compared to data from BC2, Alpha4 and the ~1,300 live experiences currently on the map. What benchmarks did you use for these projections? and when do you expect these projections to be achievable?
Thank you very much again 
ā
On a personal note, I like the vision of the Councilās proposal, but I think we need to combine all the features proposed into one big project with a clear timeline for the final product and a new single budget. Also, I would like to see data and revenue projections based on our current stats.
Cheers,
Dr. M
@TheVisionEx We need to understand the access pass concept better because it seems like your biggest selling point.
Here is how I understand it, please correct me if Iām wrong:
Utility: The pass is just NFT like any other but it specifically is used for accessing experiences on the Sandbox. It can also be used for creating bridged collections.
Technical Execution: You are going to write a smart contract that exists as a delegate of the Sandboxās contracts, meaning that it will inherit the right to mint Sandbox assets. This contract will also have specific access to something called the Universal Catalyst, which I assume is essentially an admin power that allows unlimited asset minting without burning catalysts. This will enable game makers to mass mint assets that can then be used as access passes without needing catalysts or even voxel models, using the current functionality that exists in Sandbox where game publishers can require players to own certain assets to access experiences. Not totally clear on the bridged collections aspect, but I assume it will function similarly to how BAYC avatars work today, where they might say you can only access this area or experience if you have a BAYC NFT.
I donāt mean to be alarmist, and will delete this section if I am misinterpreting the ramifications, but this seems like an obscene amount of power to give your team.
By doing this we would be essentially designating your team as the only entity with the power to mint Sandbox NFTs for free, and you would be taking 2.5% of gross marketplace volume as your fee. Given that itās free and that the Sandbox doesnāt currently offer free mints, chances are high people would go to your website to mint instead of Sandbox any time your features were good enough, leading to you dominating a large percentage of mints. This is a crazy amount of power to grant you, and the 2.5% fee could end up being a ridiculous amount of money.
Frankly, we objectively need some sort of unlimited much cheaper mint option in the Sandbox, because otherwise it will be way too expensive to make mass market use of them. As a game publisher I want to be able to give my players cheap NFTs and have them work their way up to the bigger ones, but the cheapest right now is $0.30 which comes out to $3000 dollars if I have 10k players. So I really like the concept of this, but to give the power to operate it to a third party seems very sketchy.
Please correct me if I am wrong about the above, and I will remove
1/2. To reach an iteration stage, itās necessary to have at least a POC.
That said, given the projectās current stage, thereās no doubt weāre not yet in the iteration phaseāwe still need to finalize the MVP.
For the MVP, there are still some elements that remain undefined and will be addressed with Milestone 1. Over the last three years, weāve completed over 45 projects, and it makes sense that certain decisions are made once the project is fully outlined to avoid unnecessary rework.
In this case, a few things that will need to be defined include:
That being said, this shouldnāt be a problemāthe proposal is clear enough to deliver excellent results, and this situation is perfectly natural.
@DrMetaverso, and DAO members, FYI.
As a user, beta tester, investor, and fan of The Sandbox for over 3 years, I have a strong personal and professional interest in this project. While Iāve always wanted to be more involved, I hadnāt found an opportunity as compelling as this oneāuntil now.
To validate my commitment, you can verify my assets stored on-chain under my personal wallet, gonzacolo.ethāsuch as my Premium Sand Land transaction (still holding this one) and my first Land purchase.
Additionally, Iāve visited The Sandbox office during EthCC in both 2022 and 2023.
Additional thoughts from my end.
First a general comment about the way answers to RFPs are presented via the TLDR. this should be done via a tabular format with exact same wording for each critreria that has been asked in the RFP side by side. DAO admin team spent already significant amount time reading through those proposals therefore having this tabular format will help a lot the community. The remaining work of the community would be to ask clarification questions and list pros and cons for each. @Geraldine
I already commented about āThe councilā proposal (disclaimer: company is not linked to the TSB DAO ) therefore here are my few thoughts on the second proposals. I have not much to say on the technical aspect of the proposals that seems at a first glance very robust and professional. On the other side your proposal is full of disclaimer about the TSB and TSB DAO ecosystem which is a sign of limited understanding of that TSB ecosystem.
In that sense I share the view of @DrMetaverso that I see under my eyes 2 very complementary proposals and of course you are going to hate me for asking this but would you consider discussing both companies together and found a common ground for a collaboration at least for the MVP and the 1 year maintenance period?
The main reason for the ask is at the end of the day nobody will make any money after 1 year if the MVP is not Viable. Why not build on strengths of each others?
Diplo, I think youāve sort of hit the nail on the head. We absolutely would, as mentioned, be a portal for minting those assets to decrease costs to developers and to increase revenue options for developers.
What we did when we concepted this was solve three core problems.
So youāve got $700 in revenue, with $50,000-90,000 in expense. We can remedy this with an in-demand item. (This sets us apart from the competition, because we understand the market and platform, weāre not just Web devs.)
To your point, there may be a slight misunderstanding. Our minting contract will not allow users to mint voxel assets (persay) for use in your games. The contract will essentially be a modernized format of the TSB contract under the āArtā tag (as I recall, @KamiSawZe is the expert on this part and did the direct consultation with the team in research. This would not allow for catalyst free minting on assets, as the new asset would be uniquely tagged and said assets can act as a unique Access Pass, unrelated to other asset functions in the Game Maker or other portions of TSB.
Still, the idea of a concentration of power is something weāre just not interested in. Weāve been here for 5 and 6 years in the ecosystem, consistently working to give you as developers what you need to keep giving power back to you. In full disclosure, I love the idea only so that we can empower developers like Tuschay Studios, King of Crypto Games, Sandja, and other great independent development teams. We want to make sure they can fund projects on their schedule, and ensure that development continues of, by, and for the players.
Let me know if you have any more questions. Iāve got this conversation up 24/7!
Got it, thanks for clarification. Yeah regardless of whether you are interested in it or not, we would essentially be giving you a free mint power that nobody else has access to. If the Sandbox made it available through its website and access to the smart contract was public I would be fine with it. Otherwise this is way too much power to give away.
PORTFOLIO
Here is our web developerās portfolio. I have several websites and social media accounts which could be considered portfolios, though Iām not sure they are particularly relevant to what weāre discussing here. Iāve been doing artwork all my life and I leave behind a trail of art spanning nearly 20 years of professional work. If youāre curious you can see some of that here (with links to other sites).
What I think is much more on topic is my work in The Sandbox over the past 6 years. Some of this I go over on the first page of our proposal. I donāt like to brag too much about what Iāve done in The Sandbox, as itās a team effort and hundreds of people have put in a lot of work to make it what it is today. But for the sake of this discussion, Iāll share some more of the specifics of what Iāve worked on. One of my proudest achievements is getting to see my fingerprints on basically anything that is made in The Sandbox. Iāve been involved for so long that my work is intertwined with nearly everything made on the platform.
So not exactly a portfolio, but I hope it shows my dedication to the platform and my history of success here. I know the place inside and out, and I know how to win here.
ON PASS MINTING
Also for @DrMetaverso who asked a similar question.
Iām still getting used to this particular forum layout, so Joseph may have already answered this, but basically you wouldnāt necessarily be minting Sandbox assets. It is possible to link external contracts, the exact same way BAYC and other avatar projects are bridged to give you access through your avatars to premium areas/content with the āNFT sensorā feature.
Whether we use this bridging feature or we get delegated the power to help with āuniversal catalystā minting (the way Alpha Season 4 passes were minted in bulk) is yet to be seen. I work closely with the teams that do both of these things and Iām confident we can deliver on one or both of these methods. One of our highest goals is to give ALL creators easy access to pass minting in a way that is affordable and flexible to the creatorās needs. It is critical that LAND owners in The Sandbox have a clear path forward for monetizing their creations.
ON ANALYTICS
I think Josephās answers here were great. Just one small addition to the first question: as we interface with The Sandboxās dashboard and data teams to get analytics data, you may simply see these things also added to the existing analytics dashboard all LAND owners have for their published experiences. Putting those analytics on our site might be redundant, though itās also possible The Sandbox dashboard might give us data streams they donāt feel the need to publish on their own pages. That has yet to be seen.
However, what we can provide that The Sandbox wonāt be able to is analytics on our side of the platform. Showing you what social posts are driving traffic to your Play button is key for learning about your audience and how to engage them.
Thanks!
I think I understand it better now. So essentially, we are allowing devs/Studios to use universal catalysts.
I wonder if this could be an SIP on its own to push TSB to open it up for us. I mean it would be more efficient and maybe faster to do it that way!