Olympics (IOC) Launch Paris 2024 NFT Pins

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Overview of Activation 📍

nWay, an Animoca Brands subsidiary, have launched ‘Olympic Games Paris 2024 Mascot NFT Digital Pins’. A mouthful, I know.

nWay are best known as a games publisher, and developed the ‘Olympics GO! Paris 2024’ game.

The digital pins in their design focus on the Paris 2024 Olympics mascot, and the collectible is built on Layer 2 Base, as part of their ‘Onchain Summer’ campaign. There are two designs to choose from, one that includes the Olympics Paris 2024 flag, and one simply just of the mascot.

Jesse Pollak, creator of Base said:

The digital pin collectibles themselves are non-transferable NFTs and require a Base-supported wallet for minting. The minting period is between July 9th and August 12th 2024, coinciding with ‘Onchain Summer’. Those who want to mint the digital pins must use Magic Eden, the NFT marketplace.

At the time of writing, there have been over 50,000 claims.

User Experience 📱

The user experience for this drop left much to be desired.

1. Go to Magic Eden, the NFT platform

2. Connect your Base-supported wallet

3. Switch networks to Base

4. Mint the collectible, if you have enough Ethereum to cover gas fees.
   4a) If you don’t have enough Ethereum in your Base wallet, deposit Ethereum

5. Success - you have minted the ‘Olympic Games Paris 2024 Mascot NFT Digital Pins’!

A 4-5 process to claim a free digital collectible is not conducive to onboarding non-crypto native audiences, which presumably, the ‘Summer of Sport’ aims to do on Base.

I’ve been in this space for going on 7 years and I found the experience janky. I sent this to some friends who are experienced in minting onchain, and they also found it difficult, so I was not alone.

Now picture this — you’ve never touched a crypto asset in your life. You’re a fan of the Olympics. Perhaps you’ve played the nWay published Olympics game, and have seen this advertised. You are redirected to Magic Eden to claim your first digital collectible. Then you realise there are more steps to it than booking and checking in for a flight.

Outside of sports, the modern fan is used to flawless experiences in their digital experiences. Spotify, Google, Apple, gaming platforms and most modern digital apps have near-flawless onboarding experiences, and the functions within the applications have very little user friction.

It’s surprising to me, considering how big a brand the IOC is, that there was not greater emphasis on a simplified experience.

Consider this 4-5 step experience compared to Floor— a mobile crypto application, which feels smooth and intuitive (I’m biased!). It doesn’t feel like a crypto application, and I mean this as a compliment.

On their mobile native app, you can one-click mint collectibles and the experience is one of the best in crypto. The collectible shown in the example is also on Base.

It shows that the technology and interfaces to do this excellently in the market, but this IOC experience has been constructed with minimum viable functionality from a user experience perspective. 

Free NFTs… then what? 🤔

As a rights holder or brand, when approaching Web3 as a function — it’s very easy to go too big too soon. 

There’s a temptation from many decision makers to be bold, and not surface-level, with whatever they do in this space. But if this (Web3) is new to your business, starting small and learning from that experience is wise. 

There are typically three routes that most rights holders and brands take when approaching this space:

1. Free digital collectibles, at scale 

2. Concentrated NFT drops, small scale, higher in revenue 

3. A more holistic, loyalty experience that uses features of blockchain to enhance fan engagement 

Free digital collectibles (1), have no monetary value (which halts user expectations) and are non-speculative. This is a nice contrast to some negative optics in crypto, an industry craving legitimacy. They’re for fun, and give fans a light touch, easy first-time portal to Web3.

To be a success in this category, you want to scale, and there has to be an excellent and easy onboarding process — equivalent to single sign-on via Google or other social media profiles. Which of course, is not the case for this IOC experience. 

So what is the aim for the rights holder or brand when approaching Web3 in this manner?

One of the big points that rights holders are realising is how valuable the data can be here. Not in a dystopian way, but genuinely better understanding their fans, especially those who do not regularly attend sports events in real life. That ’99%’ of fans that don’t attend these events, may never do so, and thus their relationship with the sports event or brand is purely digital. And on those fans, there is incredibly little data that these sports brands have to create great digital fan experiences. Some simply use spreadsheets to track fan engagement. Some, don’t even have that level of sophistication.

McLaren Racing, an example I point to often, had 2.8m+ claims last season from their free digital collectible program the 23/23, from 620k+ unique accounts. The Discord community they have of 70k+ people, which is predominantly funnelled from their Web3 activities and mostly from the 23/23 campaign, is more engaged in terms of activity than their Instagram page of 13m+ followers. These numbers are real. They mean something, whether you’re a Web3 sceptic or not. 

But the question remains: Even at this scale, what do you do with these free NFTs?

That is the chasm that I hope these sports brands cross over the next 12 months. 

Analysis & Concluding Thoughts 🧠

The user experience in crypto broadly speaking has come on leaps and bounds over the past few years. But the IOC experience did disappoint, and it’s a shame to see such valuable and unique rights being wasted in this manner. 

It felt like a tick-box exercise, when in reality it could have been so much more. 

For Base, the blockchain, their ‘Summer of Sports’ will no doubt have a multitude of great drops over the next few months — but my hope as a consumer and fan, and also an analyst of this space, is that they create more intuitive and simple user experiences for those non-crypto native fans — as they have done with other drops. After all, Coinbase, the creators of Base, are the ‘godfather’ of onboarding regular people into crypto. 

To conclude, one thing that I’ve been discussing and thinking about recently is the incentive alignment between rights holder, vendor and chain/network. 

Sometimes, this is lacking. But, where I think there is some work to be done from the inside of these organisations and partnerships, is to discover the core ‘KPIs’ that you can assess something against. 

We could call this the what-does-good-look-like-ometer. It’s something that is an afterthought for the infrastructure providers (chains), the ‘doers’ (vendor) and the rights holder/licensor. 

There is a lack of reference point in the ‘consumer’ part of crypto.

If you start a crypto exchange tomorrow, you have 10-15 reference points you can compare yourself against. Onboarding. User experience. Volume. Users. Revenue. Liquidity. 

If you create a crypto wallet product tomorrow, you have dozens of reference points to compare yourself against. Onboarding. User experience. Functionality. Revenue. APIs. 

But when creating a proposition that uses rights or is consumer-facing, or more specifically, something that is aimed at non-crypto native people, the reference points are harder to come by. I’m regularly stunned by how few people I speak to, working on products like these, know with great detail some of these case studies — such as McLaren’s 23/23 digital collectible campaign.

The what-does-good-look-like-ometer needs to be front and centre when these propositions are being created. But right now, the plane is being built while it’s being flown. Something that likely needs to change for the velocity of top-class consumer crypto propositions to increase. 

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