From a $4.9 Million Sale to a Metaverse Boom and Back: The Sandbox's Founders

In August 2018, a small game studio with 27 employees in San Francisco and Buenos Aires was sold to a Hong Kong company for $4.875 million, in cash and shares. Three years later, the game it made was being talked about alongside Facebook's metaverse plans, celebrities were buying virtual land in it, and SoftBank was leading a $93 million investment.

The studio was Pixowl, the game was The Sandbox, and the two founders at the centre of it all were Sébastien Borget and Arthur Madrid. Their story is one of the biggest jumps in value in blockchain gaming, and one of the most abrupt endings.

A mobile hit before crypto

Pixowl was founded in May 2011 by Adrien Duermaël, Arthur Madrid and Sébastien Borget. Its early game Doodle Grub had more than 3 million users by August 2011, and in 2012 it released The Sandbox, a pixel-art world-building game for phones. The company raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2012.

By 2018, Pixowl was a modest, respected mobile studio. Animoca Brands bought it that August and set out to rebuild The Sandbox as a 3D voxel world on the blockchain, where players would own land and items as NFTs.

The boom years

The blockchain version was funded the crypto way. In March 2020, the company raised $2.01 million and planned further raises by selling SAND, its Ethereum-based token. Land was sold in plots, and demand rose fast:

• In February 2021, two land sales totalled $2.8 million.
• By November 2021, there were more than 12,000 digital landowners.
• In November 2021, a $93 million Series B led by SoftBank brought in LG Technology Ventures and Samsung Next.
• In late 2021, a $4.3 million land deal involving Atari and Republic Realm was reported as the largest virtual land sale to that date.

Celebrities arrived. Snoop Dogg and deadmau5 owned large parcels, the Winklevoss twins and Hong Kong's Adrian Cheng became landowners, and Gucci opened a "Gucci Vault" space in October 2022. The game's first alpha, from 29 November to 20 December 2021, drew more than 200,000 users.

For Borget and Madrid, who ran the company inside Animoca, the boom turned a $4.9 million studio into one of the best-known names in web3. Their personal wealth has not been published by Forbes or Bloomberg.

Questions about players

As the market cooled, so did scrutiny of the numbers. In October 2022, a report cited about 500 daily active users on the blockchain. Animoca's Yat Siu responded that on-chain activity did not reflect engagement, and said the game had around 200,000 monthly active users. The gap between land prices and the number of people actually playing became the central criticism of the metaverse boom.

The exit

In August 2025, the story turned. Animoca, The Sandbox's main shareholder, laid off more than half of its roughly 250 staff and closed several offices, including in Lyon, Argentina, Uruguay, South Korea, Thailand and Turkey. Animoca's own CEO, Robby Yung, had been appointed CEO of The Sandbox about two weeks earlier.

Borget moved to an "ambassador" role and Madrid to "chairman". An internal source told Blockworks that both "no longer have executive powers"; Animoca said both "remain deeply involved". The same reporting said Animoca had spent about $300 million on The Sandbox over eight years and was unhappy with the results, and that the company was looking at crypto apps, including a memecoin launchpad, which Animoca denied meant abandoning its core mission.

Why it matters

Borget and Madrid are proof that the boom could turn a small studio into a global brand almost overnight, and that the people who build such brands do not always get to keep running them. Their 2018 sale price and the $300 million Animoca later put in are both real numbers. The distance between them is the story of the metaverse era.

Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.