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Intro Notes & Plugs 🔌

This week, I’m diving into one project and then dissecting two industry announcements. This might not be as exciting as talking about how a sports franchise could be run as a DAO, but if you’re serious about learning this space and knowing how you can manoeuvre in this new world from a sporting perspective - these things are massive. There’s not as much as glitz and glamour, but I’ll preface this by saying some of the announcements we’ve seen over the last week are going to be world defining.

🔌 Check out this awesome reel by COPA90 here - showcasing what we do. It’s really great and if you’d like to talk, don’t hesitate to email/DM me.

🔌 I produced and hosted the first episode of the Shiny podcast…a podcast which is decentrally run by the Shiny Object Social Club. From the inception of an idea to publication, it was probably less than 6 working days. Traditional orgs aren’t going to be able to live with the speed that DAOs/communities move at in the future…think about it, right now it’s just Discord and a few primitive tools.

🔌 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 :)

Stories & projects of the week

1) - NFTeams launches: Own your own digital sporting franchise-

The Story

Lifted from their website, NFTeams is simply:

What do they look like? Here’s an example:

They’re kind of like mascot/PFP/sports franchise logo all rolled into one.

So what can you actually do with these teams?

1. First off, you get full copyright ownership. What you do with this brand is completely up to you. Want to create a YouTube channel that makes up a narrative about said team? You can do so. You can basically do whatever you want with it.

2. Each NFTeam is a ticket into any future games that are created. Each month a new winning team will be crowned and showered with prizes.

3. Governance: 1 NFT = 1 vote in how the league works and how the community fund is used.

There are a few other interesting things such as merch drops, community access and also the ability to eventually own players when they are created (on their roadmap).

To summarise this is basically march madness meets football manager or any other manager based simulation game, meets fantasy football.

The project sold out when during its public sale and has had volumes of 90 ETH over the past 30 days on OpenSea (~ $340k at the time of writing). A reasonable success when it comes to the Sporting NFT market.

Thoughts[Disclaimer, I do not own any NFTeams NFTs currently but may dabble in the future]

There’s something interesting here, but really and truly this only goes as far as the community and core team take it. What I’m seeing from a lot of NFT projects at the moment is:

• Hype and lack of execution

• They do marketing wrong

• They think community alone takes them to the moon

• Lots of these communities are filled with people who aren’t interested in building, they’re interested in price 

What the good ones are doing:

• Not hyping up their public sale too much

• Underpromising and overdelivering, whilst still keeping the community in the loop and communicating on a daily basis with them

• Creating a robust discord that is managed by people who filter out bad actors and spammers

It remains to be seen which camp NFTeams falls into, but I’m hoping it’s the latter. These projects in terms of their ceiling are only really capped by the imagination of the builders surrounding them. What you could see is a transfer market where future minted players are bought and sold by franchises. You could see various sub-games created for specific sports.

A concern of mine is if the initial game isn’t that captivating and it could have people losing interest. I suppose it’s the community and core teams’ job to really paint a picture in terms of what this could be in the future. That’s the hard part. Telling the story and creating an environment that fosters blue sky thinking but also executes consistently. 

Definitely a project to keep an eye on…

Crypto Deep Dive 1: Coinbase rolls out NFT platform and Stripe launches Crypto team

These last 7 days have been very difficult to keep up with when it comes to Crypto. These two gigantic announcements were the latest in a flurry of activity from huge players, over the last few months. Let’s start off with Coinbase.

I want to start off with this stat: OpenSea dubbed the eBay of NFTs - where most trade activity goes on when it comes to NFTs, have only got 500k active wallets using the platform. 

Coinbase has already got over 2 million people on their waitlist for their NFT platform. This is going to hit the mainstream hard and fast.

Today, Coinbase has over 53 million users. That means that just under 4% of the users who are currently on Coinbase have applied to the Coinbase NFT waitlist.

This is absolutely massive. Crypto markets might fall and rise again as they have done in the past. In fact, the likelihood is they will do. And many of these NFT projects will trend to 0 - but this is definitely not nothing. When some of the smartest teams and people in the world are putting their resources toward NFTs, it’s probably something.

You can read more about their launch plans here

If you want to sign up for the waitlist you can do it here.

Coinbase brought Crypto to so many, now they’re going to do the same for NFTs. 

You should be ready for that wave because it is definitely coming.

What about Stripe? Why should I, a sports lover of industry professionals care about that?

If you don’t know who Stripe are, they’re a software company primarily offering payment processing and API interfaces for eCommerce companies.

They’re valued at $95bn and there are many like myself who’d sell one of my lungs (you can live with one, right?) to long some Stripe stock if it ever goes public.

Stripe building a Crypto team is kinda like the financial services equivalent of Netflix creating their own studio, or gaming subsidiary. It’s monumental.What they build I’m unsure. In January 2018 Stripe actually ended Bitcoin payments. It’s not exactly mixed signals, but it’s a gear shift from “we don’t really care about this anymore” to “Let’s build a team dedicated to this space”.

Again there is nothing direct here for you Sports fans. This is just a point in case that Stripe are an industry-defining titan that is taking Crypto seriously. If they are, you should start asking yourself why you aren’t?

Crypto Deep Dive 2: Steam Ban Blockchain Games

If you don’t know who Steam are, they’re a game distribution service.

Below are their new rules and guidelines for NFT and blockchain-based games.

Before I give my own thoughts on this, I’d urge you to read Loopify’s thread below:

It has some really great takes, one of which is being used by a lot of Crypto communities that this is the ‘blockbuster’ moment where old incumbent falls hard as new challengers enters the market.

Whilst I believe that play-to-earn or blockchain-based games are going to enable a similar level of disruption to that of Netflix and streaming services to Blockbuster, I do think there’s some nuance here. It’s the same level of disruption but the manner in which it’s going to happen is different. Netflix won because:

• The internet became able to suddenly stream high res video online

• It enabled a more cost-efficient, practical model which didn’t require people to leave their homes

The actual product, however, is the same (humour me). The endpoint is ‘watching something’ it’s just not delivered in the same way. With play to earn gaming, we’re talking about a complete subversion of the gaming industry in terms of how consumers interact with in-game assets. It’s about ownership, the ability to earn and the ability to have upside and exposure to something that you really love doing and feel will be larger in terms of its economy in the future. We’re talking about creating micro-economies with actual tangible stakes taken by customers here.

Why is this all relevant to Sports?

It might not be right now, but gamification and gaming are going to become a larger part of our digital lives.

FIFA and PES have been large parts of my childhood growing up, but the games that the next generation play are going to be totally different. My future kids will likely find it weird that I spent hours on end trying to build a better FIFA ultimate team with no reward. And again it’s not just about gaming, it’s gamification. The way that sports entities interact with their fans and consumers is going to feel and look much more gamelike every year on from now.

What was once a social and content experience beyond the 90 minutes of a soccer match is suddenly shifting toward gamified experiences to captivate.

That’s why it’s relevant and important. 

More big stories & things to put on your radar

• The LA Lakers are the latest franchise to be sponsored by none other than Socios:

• SportsIcon keep trucking out announcements, the latest that they’re launching their NFT platform on FLOW!

• 2022 is going to be pretty mad on the Sports sponsorships side of things…

• Lazio are now sponsored by Binance in a $30m over 3 years deal.

• NBA player Tobias Harris purchases a bored ape…

Great reads and great tweeting

• Facebook is hiring 10,000 employees to build the ‘metaverse’ :shrugs:This feels quite boomer

• This goes for brands as well, do something new

• If you think Crypto is crazy, take a look at stocks land

• Steam says no, Epic says maybe…?

Thanks!

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