Gate News, April 1, at EthCC[9], The Sandbox co-founder and COO Sebastien Borget revealed that the mobile native game The Sandbox NEXT began its first round of stress testing on March 26. NEXT has moved away from the Unity engine used on the previous main platform and is being developed with Unreal Engine (Unreal Engine), aiming to deliver higher image quality and improved physics engine performance on mobile. NEXT is a multiplayer battle royale survival game that supports 20 players competing in the same match, and it has been optimized for mobile with auto-aiming and shooting mechanics; at launch, it includes two maps: Desert and City. Players can directly carry over their identity, game progress, and NFT assets from The Sandbox main platform to use on mobile. Sebastien said that NEXT complements SANDchain, the ZKsync-based layer-2 network launching in September 2025, and that the L2’s low-cost transactions will support mobile users’ needs for asset minting and marketplace trading.