The Sandbox’s Largest Market for Creators Is Now India: Co-Founder Sebastien Borget

• India has more than 66,000 content creators on the Metaverse platform The Sandbox, more than any other country.

• The increase follows the platform’s decision to push for growth in India, and it’s now targeting 1 million users in two years.

India has become Metaverse platform The Sandbox’s largest supplier of content creators as the number of users doubled to 350,000 less than a year after the Web3 project said it planned to make the nation its largest market.

The country now supplies 66,000 creators, who develop games for the immersive environment, compared with 59,989 in the U.S. and 25,335 in Brazil. The plan to focus on India was announced in December, and the platform is now targeting 1 million users in two years, co-founder Sebastien Borget told CoinDesk in an interview.

Growth was propelled by projects run directly by The Sandbox or with its Indian venture, BharatBox, which is partially backed by CoinDCX, an Indian crypto exchange with around 16 million users.

“India became the No. 1 overall across all countries … thanks to all the different boot camps and education programs that we’ve run on the ground, either directly with BharatBox or with some of our partners, like CoinDCX,” Borget said.

BharatBox was initally capitalized with $1 million. Another $200,000 will be deployed by the fourth quarter, BharatBox CEO Karan Keswani said. While The Sandbox raised $20 million at a $1 billion valuation earlier this year, India didn’t need further investment because the venture was designed to be “self sufficient and autonomous,” capable of generating its own revenue, Borget said.

“We’ve proven that India is not like just the tech workforce of the world,” Borget said. “We’ve shown that blockchain projects can be successful by introducing development blockchain but also in the content and entertainment side.”

As many as 1,060 avatars of the highly successful Indian film, Jab We Met, were sold within two weeks of the collection going on sale, Keswani said indicating a successful foray into the nation’s cinema industry.

Talking about the larger Web3 market, Borget said, “I think we are still not in the bull market.”

The industry has seen a rise in interest since the approvals of spot-crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in the U.S., which have driven more institutional money into crypto, but that hasn’t translated into more user adoption specifically because it’s not retail investors using their savings to put into crypto, he said.

Still, strong interest in Web3 adoption has continued because of the emergence of better-quality new games and the messaging service Telegram’s distribution network, Borget said.

Borget also commented on the arrest last week of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France on charges including being complicit in allowing illicit transactions and the dissemination of child exploitation material on the platform.

“Privacy is a fundamental right but if an application is being used to commit serious crimes, we cannot be neutral and not help the authorities,” Borget said.