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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

Price aside, this is definitely the most interesting space to be living and breathing every day. There’s no doubt in my mind about that.

Meeting people more frequently this summer in real life has solidified that thought.

The events and meets have a sense of energy and verve that I’ve not seen before. There are a lot of passionate people that are going to be building in crypto regardless of the price. Many of them, myself included, have already seen 80-95% washout drops in the market before.

This level of dip won’t stop them.

Either crypto is dead.

Or the alternative is that it is gearing up to cross the chasm of consumer use cases in the next cycle.

I think the latter is extremely exciting. And the verve and energy I feel - it’s coming from people trying to build exactly that.

PSA - next week’s newsletter will be on Tuesday!

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🔌 I’m going to be in NYC for NFT NYC at the end of June. If you’d like to connect IRL - hit me up with an email!

🔌 I’ll be in Orlando from the 25th-27th of June if any subscribers want to connect!

This Week’s Deep Dive: BIG3 to allow fans ownership of basketball teams through NFTs

Fan ownership of sports franchises has often been mooted as a big potential selling point for crypto in sports.

But it hasn’t really panned out all that well, so far?

BIG3 are trying to change just that.

So what are they?

In short, it’s a 3-on-3 Basketball league founded by none other than Hip Hop icon Ice Cube.

Traditionally, basketball is 5-on-5, so this is a faster-paced and smaller version.

The league consists of 12 teams whose rosters include both former NBA players and international players.

They don’t consider themselves to be in competition with the NBA. The rules and format of BIG3 are fundamentally different from the NBA’s (half-court play, a four-point shot, games played until 60 points, etc.) In addition to that, there are four matches played per night, giving the league a more fast paced, action-packed feel.

3-on-3 isn’t an entirely new sport though. Small sided versions of games are played regularly around the world, whether it be Soccer, Rugby or Basketball. Ice Cube and co, have professionalised it, however, with the creation of BIG3.

So BIG3 are a new, alternative but also a supplementary ‘product’ to basketball. They’re not associated officially in any sense - but there’s a huge crossover in fanbases considering former pros play and are involved commercially.

So what’s the web3 angle here?

BIG3 released NFTs that grant ownership of teams in their league.

As their website reads:

The likes of Krause House, Snoop Dogg and Gary V have all purchased teams via the fire tier NFTs.

Of the 25 fire NFTs for each team, a CEO is selected. That delegate, as well as two others, will have greater responsibilities than the rest of the fire tier holders for that specific team.

Pro sports are no longer the only ball game

I’m a huge fan of greenfield brands no matter the sports. Especially when they’re lateral to mainstream sports. That’s what I like about this. The new owners of these teams have a say in crafting the future of them.

The buy-in is of course huge, but BIG3 will validate that in their minds by saying that these buyers have a chance to mould history in the making.

Even with that in mind though, I do feel the price point is daunting.

I myself co-created the Fintech League, a 6-aside football league for fintech companies. It ended up being sponsored by Mastercard after starting as a bit of a joke.

They saw the value in a close-knit, niche, community-oriented sporting league that brought people together.

Looking further afield, if you look at SE DONS, one of the most famous Sunday league sides (not professional) out there, they outsell most professional football clubs in the UK outside of the Premier League from a merchandise perspective. Which is crazy. 

Is this experiment true fan ownership?

Is this really true fan ownership, or is this just marketing activity for NFT communities or a vanity project for richer folks?

Fan ownership right now in sports is basically the above, isn’t it?

People or conglomerates who can afford to buy sports teams (that are not amazing from a revenue generation perspective) because they can. 

I think BIG3 are going one step down the road here, and it’s definitely a lot better than most fan ownership projects that use NFTs so far, but is it exactly what fans want?

When I think of fan ownership I think of fans owning a sports franchise in a more distributed way than 1000 NFTs.

Again, this is a step in the right direction, albeit in what essentially is a new sport that can move a lot more nimbly.

The tough part for federations or leagues is deciding how involved fans actually need to be.

The issue we have in the NFT space is that engagement is wanted by projects, but there are only so many collectors to go around.

So if your engagement play is actually owning part of a sports franchise, that can be a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is if you have a hyper-engaged audience who are really keen to be part of the events, money-can’t-buy perks and who love being part of this thing - it can be gold dust. The curse is if you require token holders to engage too regularly, you can find fatigue within your collectors.

It’s a difficult thing to balance.

The delegation that we’ve seen BIG3 execute is definitely a wise move, because of said fatigue.

The future of fan ownership

For this to scale beyond smaller, nimbler leagues - operationally - these fan ownership, NFT backed models have to be far smoother.

The operational level required to run a football team, a soccer team or a basketball team is high.

The expertise required is huge.

This is one of those things that is great in theory, but in practice, it’s far too early.

Crypto isn’t there from a governance, operations, security or pragmatism perspective just yet.

The lack of mobile-native use in web3 alone is something I think automatically throttles a lot of these ideas, for example.

Could fan ownership work one day in a mainstream league that has billions of dollars flowing through it?

Potentially.

But the evolution we need to see is years away, for that to become a reality, in my humble opinion.

BIG3’s fan ownership model is a nice idea from a ground up sports brand five seasons into its making, but for us to see this in the mainstream, commercial sporting world, will take a long time.

More sports crypto stories & things to put your radar

• Crypto brands spent more than $130m this season on the NBA 

• Fake, unofficial NFTs are a big issue in the market. 

• WWE’s future of fandom looks to include NFTs. 

• HEIR to launch Lonzo Ball NFTs. I think athletes in general are getting pretty bad advice when it comes to Web3. Let’s hope this goes better than most have gone so far.

• Point 2 on sports stars getting bad advice in crypto. 

• Budweiser is now the official beer for Zed Run, the NFT horse racing game. I think this is the best activation Bud have done in Web3 so far.

• Premier League digital collectibles seem to be edging ever closer. 

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

• Chris Dixon continues to tweet really well about…well, everything?

• Stolen NFTs show that your NFT can change (if it’s not on chain) whenever the contract owners want. It’s more complicated than that, but nonetheless how projects deal with stolen NFTs will be curious in years to come.

Thanks!

Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Sporting Crypto newsletter. I’m really happy to see so many people enjoying it 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 business or entity.