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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

Another week, another newsletter. This is definitely becoming the highlight of my week, which is saying a lot considering some of the awesome work I’m involved in. One of the things I’ve been talking to a lot of people over the last few weeks about is how a DAO would run a sports franchise. I’ve written a lot about it in the newsletter, and I’ll eventually do a deeper dive at some stage. On the whole, there are just so many interesting things happening in this intersection. Every week I’m speaking to such a great variety of people who are doing an amazing array of things.

🔌 Something pretty special I’ve been working on has just released its genesis NFT. I produced an Audio documentary titled: The History and Future of NFTs with the NFTsWTF DAO…it’s pretty awesome, I can’t wait till it’s publicly available for you all to listen :) Check out the absurdly cool animation below!

🔌 I’m speaking at the NFTs.LDN event this coming Saturday. If anyone is there and wants to say hi, please do so! I’ll be hosting a Sports x NFTs panel with some very prominent people in the space. Excited! 🔌 Early days, but if you're interested in getting ahead of the curve and sponsoring the newsletter - feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you’d like to have a conversation more generally, you can also reach out there. I’ve had a few people reach out but I’ll only accept those who I genuinely think will be cool and interesting to my readers :)• Apologies to the Kings.Limited team - I got my maths a bit wrong by a factor of 10x in the previous edition of the newsletter(with a calculator in hand, can you believe it?). Kings were trying to raise £3.6m not £36m! Nonetheless, I stand by what was written in the previous newsletter - regardless of the slight error in mathematics.

Stories & projects of the week

1) -Due Dilly: Turn your Sports Cards into NFTs-

Due Dilly is a company that allows you to create physically asset-backed NFTs, in the form of tradeable sports cards.

The video above gives you an idea of what is being built.

Before I get into why I’m actually quite bullish on physical backed NFTs (something I used to think was quite boomer in its nature), I think it makes sense to get into some stats when it comes to sports memorabilia and specifically sports cards, first.

According to Verified Market Research, the global sports trading card market was worth $13.82 billion in 2019 and is projected to grow to almost $100 billion by 2027.

In 2020 alone - there were 4 million trading cards sold on eBay - a 142% year-on-year increase from 2019. The top 5 categories from a growth perspective?You guessed it - all sports.

So now that we’ve established that this is a big market…what do Due Dilly do?

They take your sports cards and turn them into NFTs.

But Pet, why would I do that?

The answer is: NFTs are better than physical items.Okay, that’s slightly tongue in cheek - what I mean by that specifically is that NFTs have so many pros when it comes to fine art or trading cards, and the more you think about this idea - the more it seems a good one.

Let’s take a look at the process:

• I take my Michael Jordan Rookie Card (I wish)

• I send it to Due Dilly and they grade my card

• They then store my card in a vault

• They issue an NFT which 1) Looks cool & 2) Proves that Pet indeed owns that Michael Jordan Rookie card

• I can now:

  • Hold that card knowing that it’ll never be damaged, in this vault

  • Trade the NFT and therefore ownership of the said asset, without having to post it anywhere and potentially damage it 

So why is this interesting and why have I changed my mind about physically-backed NFTs?

Simply put, NFTs are giving assets that were previously physical - or are digitally consumable, liquidity. Think about what it takes to sell a physical card. I have to:

• Get the card graded and certificated that it is X grade

• (This requires me to take it out of its protective frame)

• I then have to send this card by courier or take it to the buyer myself

• The buyer may want (if it’s a very expensive card) their own grading from their own trusted source

• They may want their own frame so they take said card out of its frame and store it in their own

Basically, it’s a lot messier. Here, there’s a verifiable open ledger (on a blockchain) that proves who owns what, and where the certificate of ownership and grading is stored on chain. I’m bullish on this, because even though liquidity when it comes to trading cards has increased as per the earlier referenced eBay stats - there’s still so many holes and difficulties when it comes to this market. There are still some annoyances when you introduce NFTs, but I really do believe that this makes this market a lot more robust.

To summarise, Due Dilly are building a liquidity accelerant for physical sports cards by creating verifiable proof of ownership on chain that shows the provenance of said sporting good. 

A lot of buzzwords, but you get the idea.

That’s a pretty good proposition in my eyes for a pretty big market that doesn’t look anywhere close to slowing down.

Crypto Deep Dive: Facebook rebrands to Meta…what does this mean?

The biggest news this year when it comes to Web3?

I covered this when it was a rumour last week, but I think it deserves a follow up segment…

Let’s think about what Facebook have done over the last 10 or so years.

They bought Instagram. They bought Whatsapp.They attempted to buy Snapchat. They bought Oculus VR.

Over the last 10 years, Facebook have kept ahead of the curve by buying wherever human attention went.

If you have the cash, as a business primarily - that’s a pretty decent strategy.In terms of a company, Facebook have become much more than Facebook. They’re a company that also has all of these businesses as assets under its umbrella. The question they probably asked themselves is, where is this going?Facebook’s demographic is getting older by the year and newer generations are simply not spending as much time on it. Instagram is slowly but surely pivoting into a marketplace. Whatsapp is still a messaging service. Oculus are building out hardware to become one of the gateway keepers to the future metaverse…

Essentially, we got to a point in time where Facebook had fingers in so many ‘attention’ pies and a big hardware one - the future of the company seemed far bigger than the brand that was formerly Facebook. Now Meta isn’t the coolest name.

But the rebrand is kind of right on the money if we’re honest. It encompasses what Facebook as a corporation have become. Something that customers spend a lot of their time on as their digital equivalents.

Simon has a point here. This is the equivalent of when Google became ‘more than google’ and alphabet inc became a thing.

A lot of people in the Crypto space see Facebook as what IOI are to OASIS in ready player one, and truly - it’s hard to disagree with them.

Facebook has been built on selling data. And doing it in quite horrible ways. Why does that suddenly change? What bad habits and actors will they build into this nascent, usually open-source space?

There are lots of questions to be asked and hopefully, answers will be revealed over the next few years.

Great… but why does this matter if I’m a sports fan or work in the industry?

It matters because your marketing team probably hosts content on Facebook or Instagram. They might also run ads here.

And if you’re a fan, you are probably the target market of said ads and content. By not even moving forward - you’re likely going to become part of the future metaverse just because Zuck and team propel you into it.

Moreover, this is the first big move when it comes to attention. And if you work in Sports, I’m afraid to tell you - you also work in the attention market. One of the biggest players in that very market have made a huge move. What is yours going to be?

More big stories & things to put on your radar

• Checkout.com x Socios

• Pretty much-going mainstream at this point…

• NBA and Crytpo really is turning out to be a match made in heaven

• ESPN is not yet ready to accept Crypto ads - Slow incumbent, or smart elder heads…?

Great reads, great tweeting and more general ‘stuff’

• This is a must read by Packy McCormick

• 2022 is going to be the year of DAOs and Blockchain games…

• Unreal thread by one of the smartest thinkers in the space…we’re in a bubble, but are we?

• NFTs are not just artwork…think bigger

• Communities are getting more and more exciting and important. 

• Everyone is wrong about the metaverse…according to Shaan. 

• This is super lazy by game devs of Australia…

• The world has turned upside down. a16z big hitters had to PITCH to the FWB community in order to buy $10m worth of governance tokens. 

Thanks!

Thanks for reading my first ever Sporting Crypto newsletter! If you enjoyed it, please tell your friends who might be interested - and share it on social :)