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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

Happy New Year to everyone reading Sporting Crypto!2022 was incredible. A year in which Sporting Crypto almost 5x’d in subscriber base and grew an audience of incredibly influential people in Sports, Media, Entertainment and Tech.

Here’s hoping for an even better 2023 with even more, high quality content.

First of all, I have to apologise for the radio silence of late. In late 2021, just as I was about to take a 2-week break from the newsletter Nike decided to acquire RTFKT, and I ended up having no rest whatsoever from writing.

So in 2022, I decided to stop early and with no exceptions!

This year is off to a great start however and I’m almost already fully booked with work between now and August, which is amazing.

I wish you all the best of luck for 2023.

🔌 If you’d like to work together in a consultancy or workshop capacity, please respond to this email!

🔌 If you’d like to partner or sponsor the newsletter, email back at this address or reach out on Twitter or LinkedIn.

This Week’s Deep Dive: Top 3 Web3 Trends for the Sports Industry in 2023

What better way to start the year than to make a fool of myself by predicting some trends for 2023?

Forecasting or predicting anything is extremely difficult and the further out you go, the less accurate you can be. That’s even the case with weather with ~ 90% accuracy on 5-day forecasts and 50% on 10-day forecasts. Therefore, I’ve tried to stay broad with the trends I see being prevalent in 2023 — to try and make up for any inaccuracies. I could have been really specific, but that would probably add very little value as I’d most likely be wrong on a lot of them!

So here are three trends that I see as a big part of 2023 from a Web3 perspective, and more importantly how they will impact the sports industry.

1) Co-Creation 

The word banded about by many consultants in the Web3 world is ‘community’.

And it’s true, the community aspect of NFTs especially means the overuse of this word is warranted. To many, however, there is a bit of a ‘what now’ aspect to having 30,000 people in a Discord community.

Is this just a communications tool?

Does this develop into an app, product, service or platform? 

One of the big trends that I’m seeing, that I think will be a big part of 2023, is co-creation. 

What this means is that the communities that a lot of these Web3 projects have generated are going to start to use said communities to input on the creation of the things that they themselves purchase, collect or use.

Nike seem to be the first ones who are looking at employing this idea at a mass scale. Their Web3 platform, Swoosh (Dot Swoosh/. Swoosh) will supposedly allow consumers to co-create and curate digital assets, that will then have the optionality for physical twins, alongside artists and designers.

With digital assets, Nike in this situation will be able to rapidly test with their audience what ‘hits’ in the form of NFTs. Fail fast will hit new heights in the sense that your market research now becomes what digital assets your consumers create and curate.

That feedback loop gets condensed massively and it should allow Nike to rapidly innovate from a design perspective and create a loyal audience of digitally native consumers, thus future-proofing their business.

2) Customisation

Another theme I see being a big part of 2023 for NFTs is of customisation.

The example below is from Moonbirds, one of the biggest NFT projects, led by Kevin Rose, who collaborated with crypto artist XCOPY to allow users to customise the backgrounds of their Moonbird NFTs with XCOPY art.

NFTs have been very good at just ‘being’, and being valuable. Sitting there and being, as many people think, just pictures.

2023 is where I think we see a shift to them having functionality — acting a lot more like game assets that are also collectables.

Doodles, another large NFT project are also going in this direction with Doodles 2.

They’re letting holders to customise their NFTs, and add wearables to them.

Again, there is this shift from static imagery to ‘functioning’ collectable that I think will be a big theme of 2023.

This idea of a rigid ‘picture’ grates on a lot of people who dislike NFTs. There’s a branding problem here for those who believe NFTs are stupid, or think they’re a scam. Part of that branding problem may well be the actual utility of them.

Cryptoart and static imagery NFTs are still here to stay, without a doubt in my mind, but mass consumer projects, won’t be static or rigid.

Reddit’s successful NFT ventures are a perfect example of this.

They’ve allowed for on-chain NFTs to be customised with off-chain traits and assets.

This has led to 5 million NFT sales to over 4 million unique wallets, which is an absurd statistic.

I think we’ll continue to see customisation as a big feature of most NFT plays in 2023.

Sports will be impacted by this, especially with club-specific drops and anything that is greenfield IP, rather than athlete/team-leveraged IP.

3) Big brands come to play in a meaningful way

Early on in the life cycle of NFTs, very few brands decided to dabble.

The NBA, as I’ve written about many times, had huge success in being one fo those early pioneers however, with NBA Top Shot.

But beyond that, we saw a lot of short-sighted, short-lived, speculative and frankly not very good NFT strategies by brands. 2021 and the first half of 2022 saw a lot of brands dive into this space head-first without truly understanding what they were doing.

A lot of these brands now have better experience, better support and ultimately — a down market means there’s less rush.

In late 2021 Nike decided to buy RTFKT, which meant that every exec at every brand in the world who wasn’t already thinking about Web3, started doing so.

I quote an exec I spoke to shortly after this “How do we do, what they’ve done?”

This saw a tidal wave of brand activity because they prioritised speed over quality, after feeling late, because they’d just seen such an established brand making such a big play.

If 2022 was the year of experimentation and speculation, 2023 will be the year brands build meaningful things that utilise blockchain technology.

2022 was the year of the casino. 2023 could well be the year of the factory.

More sports crypto stories & things to put on your radar

• The EPL and Sorare are looking to announce a deal in early 2023. 

• Crawley’s new management who are having a troubling start to their tenure. 

• Fanatics is selling their 60% stake in Candy Digital. Bear market things!

• Tour De France 2023 have launched their digital collectibles. 

• Manchester United’s free NFT drop had ~400k contract calls and 200k mints. Pretty impressive number.

• Hot Wheels launched their first ever NFTs for $25 a package. 

• Former NBA star Scottie Pippen has recently gone all in on Web3 ‘stuff’. 

• Links DAO have launched a platform that gives members the ability to discover and request rounds at a plethora of private gold clubs worldwide.

• Tezos has been removed as a Red Bull Racing partner as the F1 crypto partnerships purge continues.

• Another Crypto divorce in F1. Ferrari terminates their partnership with Velas Blockchain.

• An interesting article here by Mike Butcher about blockchains and the betting market. 

• Shaq is one of the sports personalities named in a number of lawsuits about the promotion of FTX. 

Great reads, great tweeting and more general ‘stuff’ that could impact you

• Yuga labs, creator of the monkey pictures that everyone hates, have hired the former COO of Activision as their CEO. 

• 200m unique wallets on polygon as of late 2022. Incredible numbers.

• In late 2022, to round off a crazy year with the most stupid thing to ever happen, Donald Trump launched NFTs and made millions of dollars.

• Metamask users will now be able to fund their wallets using PayPal. 

Thank you!

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. If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends who might be interested - and share it on social :)

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not financial or business advice.These are my thoughts & opinions and do not represent the opinions of any other person, business, entity or sponsor.

The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

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