Will the ‘The Sandbox x Mastercard’ partnership generate positive returns

ambcrypto.com:

Payment giant Mastercard, recently announced its partnership with The Sandbox and other non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces. The partnership was entered into “bring its payments network to Web3”.

According to the publication confirming the partnership, Mastercard stated that the marketplaces with which it entered into partnership were Immutable X, Candy Digital, The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway, and Web3 infrastructure provider MoonPay. Together, these marketplaces “generated more than $25 billion in sales in 2021 — from art to sports to video games to collectibles to metaverse platforms.”

Speaking on the objective of the partnership, Raj Dhamodharan, Executive Vice President of Digital Asset Blockchain Products & Partnerships at Mastercard stated that:

“With the help of these companies, Mastercard’s expanding adoption of Web3 — a new version of the internet based on blockchain — adds to our existing work bringing our payment network to Coinbase’s new NFT marketplace, which opened to all Coinbase users in May.”

However, since this announcement, SAND, the native token of The Sandbox, has not made any significant traction. Let’s take a closer look.

Three days after the announcement of its partnership with Mastercard, The Sandbox’s native token proceeded to record a 24% decline. At an index price of $1.30 on the day of the announcement, the bears overpowered the bulls and pushed the price downwards. At press time, the SAND token exchanged hands at $0.99. With the price position marked at press time, the token was 88% shy of its ATH of $8.14. 

Source: CoinMarketCap

In the last 24 hours, the price per SAND token dropped by 13%. Although a 37% spike was registered in trading volume in the last 24 hours, the lack of a