NASCAR sign Multiyear Partnership with Cryptoys

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Introduction

👋 Welcome back to another edition of Sporting Crypto!

There is so much going on as we approach April.

Sporting Crypto will be at NFT NYC next week and at Token2049 Dubai from the 17th of April.

There’s also Paris Blockchain Week in April, as well as Digital Art Week at the end of the month.

I’m excited and curious to see what the difference is in energy and enthusiasm at big Web3 events this year compared to 12 months ago.

⚡🔌 RSVP to our Events

• Sporting Crypto SOCIAL Event: New York City, 4th April 2024. We are hosting a 200-person Sporting Crypto Social Event at the Rally Rd Museum on the 4th of April. RSVP → here! (Food and drinks on us!).

• Sporting Crypto Forum: Dubai, 18th April 2024. We are hosting a 75-person event during Token2049. You can RSVP here.

👥🔍 Sporting Crypto Job Board - Jobs of the week

• Senior Licensing Manager - Arsenal FC - Link here

• Ecosystem Lead - Aztec - Link here

• Senior Coordinator Sponsorship Management - Crypto. com- Link here

• Protocol Tech Lead - GET Protocol- Link here

• Product Designer - Dapper Labs - Link here

Visit the Sporting Crypto Job Board today to explore new career opportunities and to find the perfect fit for your organisation.

The Sporting Crypto Newsletter is supported by The HBAR Foundation.

Remember toys?

I most certainly do. My childhood was filled with them until game consoles started to take up my free time. That’s a trend that has exponentially grown, to the point that even younger children are more likely to play games on an iPad than play with toys.

So what if toys were… digital?

Discussed:

💳Partnership Overview⛓️Who are Cryptoys & OnChain Labs🚗NASCAR’s Digital Edge🧠Concluding Thoughts & Analysis

💳 Partnership Overview

OnChain Studios, via their Cryptoys proposition, have announced a multiyear partnership with NASCAR to create digital collectible toys that are playable in virtual environments.

NASCAR fans will be able to buy these digital toys and can collect, trade and play with these digital assets.

💬 Some quotes:

CEO and co-founder of OnChain Studios Will Weinraub said:

NASCAR Director of Web3 Mitch Rasmussen said:

Like real-life toys, fans will be able to ‘unbox’ their digital NASCAR toys before trading or using them in games.

🖥️ Who are OnChain Studios and Cryptoys?

OnChain Studios are a Web3 tech outfit that raised a $7.5m Seed round in October 2021 from heavy hitters including Dapper Labs, a16z and Coinfund, primarily to develop their flagship proposition - Cryptoys.

Cryptoys is pitched with the same premise as a toy company, but digital. The main distinguishing feature seems to be the ability to play your Cryptoys in games and use them in online experiences.

OnChain Studios raised a further $23m via their Series A in June 2022, less than 9 months after their Seed Round. Again, it was from notable investors such as a16z, Dapper Labs, Animoca Labs and also heritage toy brand Mattel. Two weeks before the announcement, Cryptoys had entered a multi-year partnership with Mattel — bringing their iconic IP to the Cryptoyverse.

Cyrptoys have launched digital collectible toys with the likes of Disney, Star Wars and Masters of the Universe with NASCAR becoming their first sports venture.

🚗NASCAR’s Digital Edge

NASCAR have become a bit of a ‘sleeper’ in the sports world when it comes to its prowess in digital and emerging tech.

The fact that they have a Web3 lead alone has them ahead of most sports organisations globally.

As an organisation, they’ve been pushing hard when it comes to next-gen, digital experiences for their fans for some years now.

At the end of 2023, NASCAR launched an immersive gaming experience called NASCAR Speed Hub on Roblox, allowing players to design cars and unlock virtual items.

In September 2023, NASCAR announced that their Cup Series Playoffs would be available in Mixed Reality. That same month, NASCAR celebrated their 75th anniversary by allowing their fans to buy NASCAR cars inside popular racing game Rocket League.

There is a drive (pardon the pun) to push hard into emerging markets where there are primarily younger audiences. 31% of NASCAR’s fans in the US are over the age of 55 and according to Statista the average age of a fan jumped from 49 in 2006 to 58 in 2016.

Those age brackets make up a very small percentage of users on Roblox or Rocket League, and most mixed reality experiences — so there is a concerted effort — like most sports, to try and make their fanbases younger.

🧠Concluding Thoughts & Analysis

How do you balance one of the most powerful characteristics that open-source blockchains give us; interoperability, with the licensing agreements and legal teams of a large commercial brand?

The answer is: you don’t. 

This is simplistic of course, but the main friction you have is that commercial departments at large sports IPs want to slice and dice rights as thin as possible so that they can leverage them for more cash.

A blockchain partner for sports brands doesn’t exist anymore unless the sums are mouthwatering. Being able to slice your rights into Blockchain gaming, Blockchain fantasy gaming, NFTs, Digital Art, Tokens and such is great if there are willing buyers — but very rarely do those activations with said willing vendor end up with fan experiences that delight while making a margin. And sometimes, rights holders don’t get the vendors they want from RFPs.

Where this partnership between Cryptoys and NASCAR skews this slightly is that these are digital toys, but playable, in a metaverse called the Cryptoyverse. It would be fascinating to know what rights were allocated to Cryptoys in this deal.

On Cryptoys, one of the things that stunned me slightly is that there still is no secondary marketplace. There may be legal or regulatory reasons for this, but if there isn’t, then a company with 40+ employees and funding of these levels should have delivered something like this already.

Further, I’m curious to see whether or not there is any cross-pollination of IP in real meaningful ways within the Cryptoyverse. This would be difficult beyond anything surface-level, but the composability of assets if there are prerequisite licensing agreements could make for some interesting remixing.

One thing that struck me was that Cryptoys don’t currently have a Digi-physical/Phygital offering, probably because getting a ‘toy’ license on top of a ‘digital toy’ license from a large brand would not be cost-effective, but even more so linking those two digital and physical collectibles respectively would likely incur even higher licensing costs.

Where this could get interesting with the likes of Mattel, who are an investor in Cryptoys.

There are also Mattel-created NASCAR toys.

Adding two plus two would make one think that some form of collaboration here is not far away.

Overall this feels like a great coup for Cryptoys, working with someone like NASCAR who are keen to push the boundaries in digital and drive their average fan age down. Cryptoys themselves have a long way to go until they can prove their thesis and sell enough digital toys to drive a considerable margin. It also remains to be seen whether or not their team can deliver on their mammoth roadmap, which includes AR filters, secondary marketplaces, playable minigames a metaverse and more. These types of products are hard to build and even harder to get traction with.

💡 Sporting Crypto Spotlight - Ep. 15 of the Podcast!

In Ep. 15 of the Podcast I was lucky enough to speak to Matt Lord, Director of Technology & Digital Systems at SailGP!

Watch the episode on YouTube!

Or your podcast player of choice… if you’d prefer not to see our faces!

🍎 Find us on Apple Podcasts here [Link]

✅ Find us on Spotify here [Link]

More Sports & Web3 Stories

• Newcastle United welcomes Animoca Brands' 'Quidd' marketplace as commercial partner (Read more here)

• Why Karate Combat Is Risking It All on Crypto (Read more here)

• Juventus F.C. Expands NFT Offering With NFT Pro Partnership (Read more here)

• Groundbreaking football league kicks off in the metaverse (Read more here)

• GET Protocol rebrand to OPEN Ticketing Ecosystem (Read more here)

• French Energy Giant EDF Subsidiary Becomes Chiliz Blockchain Validator (Read more here)

• From Yahoo: Crypto's ties to sports raise ethical questions (Read more here)

• From SBJ Marketing: The great crypto comeback? (Read more here)

• LILLIUS Drives Sells Out LILLI NFT one Crypto.com (Read more here)

General ‘Stuff’ that Could Impact You

• Alipay taps Avalanche for Web3-powered voucher program (Read more here)

• Hedera-Based Tune.FM Raises $20M for Artist-Friendly Web3 Music Platform (Read more here)

• From Tpan: Starbucks Sunsets Odyssey (Read more here)

• BlackRock Seeing Only 'A Little Bit' Demand for Ethereum from Clients, Says Head of Digital Assets (Read more here)

• Square Enix invest in Web3 game store HyperPlay (Read more here)

• London Stock Exchange to Launch Bitcoin ETN Market in May (Read more here)

Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Sporting Crypto newsletter. I’m happy to see so many people enjoying and sharing it with their networks.

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