The Sandbox strikes again with the announcement that South Korea’s KEB Hana Bank will be entering its popular metaverse. The news comes just four months after British bank HSBC entered The Sandbox ecosystem.
Hana Bank was founded in 1967 and is ranked as Korea’s best bank, offering a wide range of foreign exchange products, and holding the most valuable quantity of assets. The entry into The Sandbox by Hana Bank comes as part of a country-wide effort to expand global metaverse business, especially in the banking industry in Korea.
KED Hana and The Sandbox will form a collaborative business model and open a virtual branch of the bank in the metaverse game that lets users buy and monetize plots of digital land. The virtual branch will provide basic banking services, investment advice, and other services and banking products offered by KED Hana.
The Hana Financial Group is also entering K-Verse, a virtual space full of Korean content that helps businesses connect with younger customers. So Jung Kin, the Deputy President of KEB Hana Bank, said that people will experience Web3 through the metaverse and that the bank was excited to be a part of the “new trend.”
South Korea has pledged millions of dollars in investment in Web3 and the metaverse, so it should come as no surprise that the country’s top bank would increase its presence in a top metaverse.
The Sandbox Metaverse Is Filling Up
A decentralized metaverse on the Ethereum blockchain, The Sandbox consists of 166,000 digital land plots that users can build on and monetize. And even in this crypto bear market, we’re seeing companies and brands flock to The Sandbox at a high rate. Here are some stories from this month.
At NFT.NYC in June, the president of TIME Magazine, Keith Grossman, announced that the company had partnered with The Sandbox to build a virtual TIME Square in the metaverse. They hope to create a place where people can socialize, view art, and participate in commerce.
And last week, we saw two big headlines involving The Sandbox. First, the iconic skateboarder Tony Hawk is building the world’s largest virtual skatepark in that metaverse. The skatepark will open on 36 parcels of virtual land. Hawk said he’s always been a fan of new technologies and was fascinated by bringing a skatepark to the metaverse.
And just a few days ago, Playboy announced it was building a “MetaMansion” in The Sandbox. The MetaMansion will be accessible to Sandbox users and holders of the Playboy Rabbitars NFT set when it opens on a yet-to-be-determined date.
As The Sandbox continues to fill up with businesses and brands hoping to take advantage of the metaverse, having a bank or two seems like a good idea. Now, KED Hana has become the second bank after HSBC to stake out a presence in the virtual pixelated world.