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Over the years, when explaining what NFTs are, I would often point to Panini stickers.

So it’s ironic that Panini themselves, have grown into one of the biggest NFT businesses in the industry.

You read that correctly.

The heritage brand has posted some mighty numbers in 2025 so far, and it’s even more fascinating when you bring the macro perspective into the equation.

Last year, news broke that Fanatics would replace the sticker and card veterans as the provider of those products for the English Premier League from the 2025-26 season. Some thought it was if, not when, Panini would become extinct due to consolidation and market conditions.

Panini’s last reported revenue was $1.4bn in 2018, after a huge boost from that year’s World Cup. It’s unknown, however, just how much money Panini is making as a business right now, but you might hazard a guess that it can’t be much more than the reported 2018 number. The aforementioned competitor Fanatics made $1.6bn from collectibles in 2024 — so that is another indicator as to where the storied Italian brand’s revenues may sit.

In January 2020, Panini launched ‘Panini Blockchain’.

The concept is simple; Panini cards onchain.

The NFT arm of the business has several licenses; including the NBA, NFL, FIFA, La Liga and LFP (French Football).

Panini operate their own blockchain to bring this to life, using Hyperledger, an open-source distributed technology system started by the Linux Foundation almost a decade ago. Hyperledger is no longer operating, but Panini have built their own systems — so it won’t impact the business significantly in the short run.

There are some gamified differentiators to Panini’s NFT product compared to the physical counterpart.

Users can engage in regular challenges, and also participate in ‘crafting’, which essentially lets users burn NFTs to redeem ‘Block Points’. The product also teases ‘Staking’ although there is no information on what that might entail for users.

Although not widely known or discussed, Panini’s volumes have grown to be pretty impressive, against a backdrop where NFTs have faded in popularity, at least in terms of total volume.

Panini’s monthly sales volumes peaked back in mid 2021, before bottoming in 2024, like many NFT products.

But unlike many, Panini are on the path to eclipsing previous highs — and are indeed on track to do so in March 2025.

Indeed, 2025 so far already represents almost 10% of Panini blockchain lifetime sales volume.

If you annualised their March 2025 figures, they would hit between $60-70m, representing 5-10% of the entirety of Panini’s business revenue.

2025 is likely to be Panini NFT’s best year yet.

This comes against a backdrop of poor conditions for NFTs, which makes Panini’s NFT product success even more impressive.

In terms of monthly transactions, Panini have already broken through their previous peak — which as actually in mid 2022.

Although of course, sometimes price and sales volume, and transaction volume are inverted in their relationship — there’s a pretty strong pattern between them here.

The one thing that hasn’t reached 2022 peaks are the number of unique buyers and sellers on the platform.

That consolidated to between 1000-3000 monthly users from early 2023 until early 2025 — meaning Panini’s NFT product survived on just a few thousand regular users.

That number is however, spiking alongside the sales volume and transaction volume in March 2025.

This is now a serious part of Panini’s business.

Although the margins here are a complete unknown, the sales volumes are strong and getting stronger.

Panini’s NFT business is now 5 years old. It’s the first time a heritage brand has successfully created an NFT arm of their business for a sustained period.

Leveraging their brand and name, the partnerships they have — and combining them with something new, novel and exciting that attracts a different form of collector is no easy feat.

And in March 2025, they have beat both Sorare and TopShot in monthly volumes, which is seriously impressive. Only Courtyard can boast a better level of sales volumes, and their model is significantly different with physical cards assigned to each collectible.

There are questions, however, over the sustainability of this business with such a small pool of users. $5-6m monthly revenues seem like an exception to the norm considering their monthly unique buyers and sellers sit in the low thousands. Indeed if you take $6m in sales volume, amongst 3000 users, that’s $2000 per user per month. I know serious collectors spend vast amounts, but this doesn’t feel sustainable unless the userbase grows.

The other question I have is whether or not Panini will need to iterate their technology considering Hyperledger is no longer running. Will they build their own technology stack or migrate blockchains? Running their own, compsable blockchain in 2020 made sense. Protecting their secondary sales using this made, and makes sense. Times have changed, however, and off-the-shelf solutions that were not there 5 years ago could provide another avenue for their product to iterate and grow.

The cool thing is that nobody is talking about this. It’s not a huge headline, Panini have just quietly gone about their business in building a strong NFT arm.

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