Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been gaining a lot of popularity in the sports and gaming industry, two sectors which have been largely affected by the rise of blockchain technology.
In fact, gaming is what brought NFTs to the limelight back in 2017 with the popularity of the crypto-collectibles game CryptoKitties. Since the rise of CryptoKitties, many projects have started working with NFTs and it has also drawn the attention of tech giants like Microsoft.
The sports industry has also seen its fair share of NFT utility. Popular sports like football, NBA, NFL, have all seen NFTs in action. Internationally acclaimed clubs are taking advantage of the growing demand for NFTs. Blockchain tech is an ideal solution for creating traceable and tradable digital assets that help draft a tokenized economy.
Leading Italian football club Juventus, in partnership with blockchain-enabled fantasy football startup Sorare, is now offering blockchain-based digital collectible cards of its players. Sorare has also licensed digital collectible cards from 37 different clubs, including Roma, Napoli, West Ham, Lyon, Atletico Madrid, Porto, and Schalke.
Decentraland is another massive NFT based game that was launched recently, three years after its ICO in 2017. The game is basically a virtual world where people buy and sell digital land as well as construct buildings. The game, which uses native token MANA as the in-game payment method, had raised $20 million selling MANA tokens during the ICO. Bloomberg said in a recent article that over the last week Decentraland gamers have purchased over $1 million worth of digital anchorage on the Ethereum-based game.
The NBA and NFL are also inclined towards implementing NFTs to boost the underlying economy of the sports. In the recent NFT NYC event dedicated to non-fungible tokens, Adrienne O’Keeffe, associate vice president of partnerships at the NBA, and Sophie Gage, counsel at the NFL Player’s Association, were part of a panel that discussed the value of blockchain technology for big brands.
