🔌 Quick plug: We’ve just announced our next events in April, in Paris, Dubai and New York respectively.

9dcc, an onchain fashion and lifestyle brand, have partnered with Mastercard to create an NFT-linked apparel series during the PGA Tour’s Arnold Palmer Invitational.

It’s called ‘Pass to Priceless': Bay Hill Capsule’ — Bay Hill, Florida, being the tournament's location.

It allows Mastercard cardholders to select from nine curated items, the most expensive of which is priced at $50.

9dcc embeds NFC chips into physical products and connects them to NFTs, creating a more extensive digital experience with their holders. For example, holders of the products can engage in certain activities to earn network points, ranking them in a leaderboard.

For the Bay Hill Capsule experience, buyers can tap their phones to the chips to be rewarded with a digital collectible, a twin of their physical item that may provide them with exclusive access to “priceless possibilities” in the future. 

Pass to Priceless is Mastercard’s onchain digital experiences platform, allowing Mastercard customers to participate in ‘programs’ linked to Mastercard sponsors. For example, the UEFA Champions League Trivia Experience and indeed last year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational Activation.

It debuted last year and has had several experiences in which Mastercard cardholders can participate in.

Mastercard have essentially exported the delivery of digital experiences onchain through partners, beginning with their Pass to Priceless Platform, built in collaboration with MoonPay-owned agency Otherlife. This provides them with a solid foundation to create repeatable experiences across their diverse sponsorship portfolio.

And this makes sense.

When you're already spending tens of millions of dollars on sponsoring tier 1 properties like the UEFA Champions League and PGA Tour tournaments, allocating a percentage of that budget in excess to build something you can activate repeatedly year-on-year is a smart way to approach this space.

The timing is particularly relevant given three industry trends.

(1) The sports business model is changing.

A late 2024 study by PTI Digital revealed that 40% of rights holders surveyed (UK respondents) believed both sponsorship and direct-to-consumer digital products have significant growth potential—ahead of traditional revenue streams like ticketing, retail and hospitality.

69% of respondents predicted total revenues would either remain flat or decline in the next 12 months, with a mere 2% expecting media rights to deliver major revenue growth in the next five years.

This highlights a broader challenge: the sports industry is trying to improve revenue sources beyond broadcast and media rights.

And that survey is telling us sponsors like Mastercard, could be the answer.

(2) Concurrently, however, sponsors are under intense scrutiny to demonstrate a return on investment.

I've spoken with numerous C-suite and marketing leaders—both from crypto firms sponsoring sports and mainstream brands—who consistently face pressure from their superiors about quantifying ROI.

(This was discussed at length in a podcast episode with Mark Epps (ATP Tour) and Tareq Nazlawy (Trace) which you can find here).

So again, we go back to that point of spending in excess of the originally allocated sponsorship budget, to help maximise return. And this isn’t really a DTC play by Mastercard.

The Pass to Priceless platform approach allows Mastercard to accumulate data from customers who primarily engage as sports fans rather than as Mastercard customers. It's about fostering long-term loyalty and brand association. They understand they are not the owner of the relationship here, the league, team or tournament is. They are trying to win by association with said brands.

At the same time (3) Real World Assets Onchain fee like the crypto market’s next hockey stick moment.

The physical assets-on-chain trend is just beginning to gain momentum.

We've witnessed Courtyard's explosive growth in trading cards, making them one of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

In finance, stablecoins and treasuries lead the onchain finance revolution.

Luxury goods onchain make perfect sense for similar reasons to Courtyard and collectables being onchain; the market is plagued by fraud and counterfeit issues and authentication and provenance verification present significant challenges.

One difference here is that instead of putting existing apparel or items onchain, 9dcc are building an onchain, greenfield brand that embeds luxury and blockchain from its foundation.

To summarise, these three things in happening in parallel:

(1) Sports trying to find new revenue
(2) Sponsors trying to find and demonstrate better ROI
(3) Real World Assets On Chain

Mastercard's Pass to Priceless Platform will be interesting to follow.

Will they eventually shutter it if ROI proves insufficient or platform maintenance becomes too costly?

Or might they expand it with deeper payment integrations? A holistic onchain loyalty programme connecting payments to customer experiences with sponsors could be powerful, for example.

Currently, the platform remains relatively rudimentary, which is unsurprising for a business of Mastercard's size and incumbent status.

However, recent news could suggest a more ambitious plan, with recent reports emerging that Mastercard is developing a Multi-Token Network (MTN) for digital asset payments, aiming to create a "Venmo-like" crypto experience for users.

If they were able to successfully build something like this, we could see these non-financial consumer-facing experiences such as Pass to Priceless, integrated at the front end. Rather than just sponsoring sporting events, this could be a more ‘ecosystem’ model, capturing value at multiple touchpoints in the consumer journey through a holistic onchain loyalty program that centres around payments.

My hunch is that an incumbent like Mastercard won’t be able to pull this off themselves, and will likely have to acquire their way to something like this if they are to be successful.

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see an incumbent player continue to play in this space when so many others have taken a step back.

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