Crypto
The Sandbox Rose 54% in a Day as Metaverse Tokens Moved Together
SAND, MANA, GALA and AXS all jumped in the same hour on October 2. The Sandbox finished up 53.8% on about 40 times its usual volume, and kept climbing into October 3.
For most of September, the old metaverse and gaming tokens were among the quietest corners of crypto. That changed in a single hour on Friday. Between 07:00 and 08:00 UTC on October 2, The Sandbox's SAND jumped from $0.0482 to as high as $0.0613 on about $9.6 million of Binance spot volume — more than five times what it had traded in the entire previous day. In the same hour Decentraland's MANA rose almost 12%, Axie Infinity's AXS nearly 7% and Gala about 6%.
That timing is the most informative detail. When several tokens from one sector start moving in the same sixty minutes, the buying is aimed at the theme rather than at any single project. The price data alone doesn't tell us what set it off, and we haven't been able to tie it to one specific announcement, so it's worth being careful with the explanations that tend to appear after a move like this.
SAND kept going. It peaked at $0.0735 in the 12:00 UTC hour, gave back about 19% by early evening, then recovered to close at $0.06917, up 53.8% for the day — its highest close since June 1. Daily volume came to $63.5 million, roughly 40 times its 30-day average and the most since February 2025. MANA closed up 13.3% at $0.1005 after touching $0.1132, its highest price since early February; Gala rose 17.8% and Axie Infinity 7.7%.
The move hasn't stopped yet. Early on October 3 SAND reached $0.08396, its highest level since May and about 158% above its September 15 low of $0.0325, before easing to around $0.078. Rallies like this, in tokens that had been ignored for months, can run further than anyone expects — but they also tend to retrace sharply once the volume fades, as SAND's 19% intraday dip on Friday already showed. Thin order books carry prices in both directions.