Throughout the past years, NFTs have been gaining traction and innovating industries such as gaming, arts, music, and now even sports. The use of NFTs in the sports industry has attracted the attention of a lot of sports fans across the globe.
In this article, we’ll tackle more about sports NFTs and how it’s revolutionizing how the world sees sports.
Sports NFTs: What is it?
NFTs are non-fungible tokens that are completely unique digital assets encrypted into the blockchain and can represent intangible or tangible collectibles. NFTs contain such distinguishable information that can be verified easily and is difficult to be interchanged with something else.
Sports NFTs are the latest addition to NFTs, and it’s a new option for fans to be able to express support for their favorite athlete or team. Whether fan art, GIFs, video highlights, game badges, or the like, these can all be traded in the NFT marketplace.
What Sports NFTs Mean for the Fans
Sports NFTs have provided another opportunity for fans worldwide to show their support for their favorite team or athlete. It can also be through a form of an exclusive membership that holders receive perks like access to certain events with athletes.
Sports NFT modernizes the way tech-savvy fans interact with these public figures and, at the same time, build a community in the world of NFT and connect with fellow fans.
Virtual Tokens
Non-fungible tokens can be merged with live sports games as exclusive virtual access tokens. Fans can unlock special content that can’t be accessed publicly, such as videos from the stadium’s cameras or behind-the-scenes conversations between the coach and the team. These virtual tokens also give overseas fans who can’t watch it in person the opportunity to participate in this one-of-a-kind viewing experience.
Gaming & Fantasy Football NFTs
There are cases where NFTs are being utilized in the online sports gaming industry. If you’ve heard of fantasy football, this is where sports fans from around the world purchase, trade, or sell player cards and manage these to form a virtual sports team to participate in competitions. The NFT cards will gain or lose points depending on the athlete’s performance in real matches. Through the help of NFTs, the partnership of various clubs is strengthened, resulting in platforms offering players certain teams for purchase in the game.
Digitized Memorabilia
Digital sports collectibles are a new way for fans to be able to get a hold of some keepsakes of cards or even video highlights from games. One prominent example of this is NBA’s TopShot Collection. With the help of blockchain technology, it digitalizes and modernizes the traditional way of trading cards. Not only that but there’s also an NFT marketplace wherein you can trade video clips of NBA game highlights with other fans.
The Benefits of Sports NFT in the Industry
How exactly is the rise of sports NFTs changing the industry as we know it? Besides the fact that sports NFTs have completely innovated the traditional way of sports collectibles and going digital with it, another way was paved for professional sports teams to interact with their fans.
Increase in Fan Engagement
With digital memorabilia being accessible to anyone in any part of the world, there’s no doubt that fan engagement boosted tremendously. Sports NFTs and fan tokens have allowed fans to have a voice and influence specific club matters, such as the selection of team players and uniform design, which is why this has been in high demand.
Athletes Can Develop Their Own Digital Platform
Apart from the union with their team, athletes can individually launch their own NFT collection to increase engagement with their fans. They can preserve their intellectual property by publishing NFTs themselves.
Additional Revenue Stream to Sports Teams
Creating NFT collections can generate an extra source of income for sports leagues. Before, it was just merch and ticket sales, sponsorships, and rights to certain media. Leagues can now opt to tokenize tickets and provide exclusive clips to token holders, such as live streams, even if there’s a pandemic happening.
Final Thoughts
Sports NFTs have provided so many new opportunities for sports teams, athletes, and fans to remain connected with one another digitally, and this will continue to grow tremendously in the years to come.
