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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

This week, 137pm and I are hosting a Web3 x Sports meet-up in London to coincide with NFT London, by NFT.NYC. If you’re in town, or a London native, please come along. It’ll be fun, I promise!

On another note, Sporting Crypto has now officially hit 2000 subscribers - which is incredible. Thanks to each and every one of you and a special shout-out to those who were there for the first few editions.

Oh, and also…Happy Haloween!

🔌 I’ll be speaking at NFT LDN this week! If you’re in London, email me back at this address so we can arrange to meet.

🔌 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.

🔌 If you would like me to come to an event and speak about Sports & Crypto / NFTs, please reach out on the above platforms or reply to this email.

This Week’s Deep Dive: FIFA Partner with Altered State Machine

FIFA, who recently launched FIFA+ Collect, have stepped up their Web3 game with yet another partnership. This one is a bit more niche and complex.

Equally, it’s potentially more interesting than the more generic highlight reel based moments that FIFA dropped a couple of weeks ago. You can read more about FIFA+ Collect here, when I broke it down on Sporting Crypto:

Their new partnership is with Altered State Machine (ASM). ASM are probably one of the most progressive, ambitious and unique NFT projects in the space.

Once more, It’s a project I’ve written about in the past, at the start of the year due to one of their drops - The Artificial Intelligence Football Association.

Explaining ASM is difficult, but I did my best at the time:

ASM’s headline is ‘Make trainable AI-powered agents. Own and trade them using NFTs’

Basically, this is an NFT, that uses AI to train itself to interact with a number of different digital environments in several different ways.

Quite complex, right?

So let’s dive even deeper. One of ASM’s games is called the Artificial Intelligence Football Association:

Here’s how it works:

• AIFA is a 4x4 football game, played autonomously by your ASM All-Star agents. (Your AI NFT)

• The all-stars are any of the 40,000 3D NFTs

• These are ‘forms’ that are paired with a brain to create an AI soccer team.

• No offsides, no rules just furious competition

• Train your team and climb the AIFA rankings

The TL/DR is that your Brain ASM NFT, is the coach of your All-Star team (that are also NFTs) and you compete with other Brain owners in games.

Hopefully, you’ve kept up to speed with me so far…Clearly, there’s previous to ASM’s interest in Football.

But what does their partnership with FIFA look like ahead of the 2022 World Cup?

You would expect that considering ASM’s fairly complex proposition, the FIFA collaboration would be equally so. But from the limited information we have so far in the public domain — it doesn’t seem that the collaboration will require users to hold existing ASM NFT assets or interact with their ecosystem at all…at least during the World Cup.

The partnership centres around a game which seems fairly simple to play:

1. Predict games for free and compete with friends earning points (A simple prediction game)

2. Win rewards such as gaming setups, phones, Adidas gift cards and more.

3. You can also win clothing for a team of AI All-Star digital collectables.

4. You can also create your own collectable street football team after the world cup ends, with AI All-Stars you own, train and trade

5. To then compete in the AI League game - a FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 edition.

FIFA go for a Crypto Native Audience?

There’s not much information so I’m guessing here — but it seems as though this has two parts. There’s 1) a Free-to-play game that is open to anyone, where people can win prizes and engage with crypto at a very high level (winning NFTs) and 2) a more niche, exclusive game that those who own All-Star NFTs can compete in but this time with FIFA World Cup digital merchandise used to customise those NFTs.

This is a really interesting play and I’m curious to see how the ASM community reacts to the game and how much uptake there is.

For ASM, this is a chance to showcase their unique NFT proposition to the world - whilst also potentially attracting new members to their community.For FIFA, it’s an attempt to double down on their Web3 strategy that so far has been restricted to sponsorship (Algorand) and a mass market play in FIFA+ collect.

This play attempts to be inclusive in some aspects of the proposition (the initial prediction game) but also to service a more crypto-native audience, with deep pockets who are probably quite young.

Most brand collaborations with NFT projects don’t do particularly well. But the ones that have done well, have been extremely successful (NFTiffs, BAYC x Adidas, Nike x RTFKT). But there’s a clear synergy between FIFA and ASM who already have a football-based proposition in AIFA (Artificial Intelligence Football Association).This is probably a match made in heaven for that niche crypto native audience, which might not be a bad thing as long as FIFA can activate more broadly through other Web3 channels like FIFA+ Collect successfully.

FIFA are clearly going hard when it comes to digital for the 2022 World Cup, and there’s a fairly chunky Web3 component to it. This will be an even bigger component for the Women’s World Cup in 2023 and the Men’s World Cup in 2026.

More sports crypto stories & things to put on your radar

• The Premier League is reportedly lining up a deal with Sorare which could be worth £30m-a-year. Would prove a huge coup for the French based market leader in Fantasy NFTs.

• Puma are still pushing hard when it comes to Web3, this time merging the physical with a digital drop. 

• Warner Bros Discovery Sports (WBD Sports) is partnering with Infinite Reality to create new immersive digital experiences for sports fans powered by Web 3.0 and metaverse technologies. 

• RTFKT’s most recent collaboration, with fashion house Rinowa, didn’t go too swimmingly. 

• The New York Knicks have dropped an NFT series with Coinbase NFT called ‘New York Forever’. 

• La Liga launched LaLigaGolazo (with Dapper!) and the pricing for their genesis packs was fairly high at $200! 

• Birmingham City’s metaverse partner - Ultimo GG - is seemingly no more. Another partnership by a football club that did next to no due diligence when signing on the dotted line.

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

• This is absolutely brilliant. Reddit have done such a good job of not using NFT-related jargon, that some users didn’t even know some of their NFTs were resealable for a good amount! 

• Google launched a Blockchain Node Engine. 

• Twitter is allowing users to buy and sell NFTs via tweets.

• Are bear markets actually good for NFTs? I think this one certainly will be when we look back at this in a few years.

• A nice note from a team member at Reddit; “Describe what you’re delivering, not the tech”

Thank you!

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