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Two years ago, the crypto industry was in flux after the collapse of FTX, a then-behemoth crypto exchange that rocked the market, in particular in the U.S.

Two years later, regulated banks are partnering with exchanges for custody and liquidity provision, and are also launching stablecoins. The chair of the FED is calling Bitcoin a store of value and competitor to gold, as Bitcoin hits $100k for the first time.

2024 has been a defining year for the crypto space, where even the greatest sceptics have begrudgingly accepted that this ‘blockchain thing’ might indeed be useful.

Many have felt that this year has marked the beginning of the steep part of the' S curve’ in terms of innovation, development, and adoption.

In this report, we explore 6 key highlights in the crypto space and how they have impacted the sports industry.

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2024 NFT Volumes have declined since their 2021 and 2022 heights, and this year saw a consolidation in the market.

Across the top chains, NFT trading volumes stood at ~$23.7 billion for the year in 2022, falling to $8.7 billion in 2023. This year in 2024, the number at the time of writing (16th December 2024) is $8.3 billion, meaning it will likely match or eclipse the 2023 volumes with what remains of the year.

The average sale per NFT has dropped from ~$460 (2021) and ~$419 (2022) to ~$95 (2023) and ~$120 (2024) respectively.

The unique sellers have remained steady since the highs of 2021 (3.6m), and in 2024 have reached almost 4 million. Interestingly, the number of buyers has increased substantially in 2024 — growing from 4.5 million in 2023 to 7.4 million in 2024, with the previous highest yearly record coming in at 5.4 million in 2022.

These three additional data points combine to show that:

In terms of volumes specifically across 2024, there has been a decline throughout the year — with weekly volumes reaching $400m+ in Q1 and Q2 of 2024, before hitting lows of under $100m in Q3 and Q4, before a resurgence at the tail end of the year that correlates with the broader crypto market booming.

And zooming out, these volumes are minuscule compared to the heights of 2021 and 2022, which apart from one outlier metric, regularly saw volumes cracking billions weekly.

As you can see from this all-time graph, 2024 has certainly seen market consolidation for NFTs.

NFTs so far in the sports industry have been crucial to direct monetisation for rights holders. In 2021 and 2022, the sports industry made substantial revenues from licensing their rights to NFT vendors like Dapper Labs and Sorare. Although these companies are less dependent on the broader NFT market being healthy, it certainly has had an impact, and therefore meant that rights holders have had to temper their once lofty expectations for revenue.

When it comes to NFTs or digital collectibles, broadly speaking the licensing model has followed that of a Panini or Top collectible cards. Those businesses, however, are mature and have smoother revenue curves compared to their digitised counterparts.

In 2024, NBA Top Shot saw monthly sales volumes peak in March 2024 at ~$5.3 million, with lows of $1.3 million in August. For context, NBA Top Shot’s volumes in 2021 and 2022 regularly hit 8 figures, and had two consecutive months in February and March 2021 and its heights where the monthly volumes surpassed $220m.

Like the broader market, the consolidation in totality for NBA Top Shot throughout 2024 is clear:

These two data points show that, although Top Shot has its own audience that is largely not crypto-native — the sales and transaction volumes are correlative to the broader market.

Another long-time player in the space, Sorare, the NFT Fantasy platform, has followed Top Shot but perhaps seen a larger dip than the Dapper Labs run collectible platform.

Like Top Shot, volumes and transactions on Sorare are extremely seasonal — with the offseason, and months approaching it, seeing lows in volume and transaction volume — before picking up again in anticipation of the new season (late July and August).

In totality, 2024 has seen a substantial drop off compared to 2023 in sales volume — decreasing from $173m to $96m — a 44% decrease.

Total transactions dropped from 5.1 million to 4.8 million, a 5.8% decrease, far smaller than the volume decrease.

Overall, 2024 has been difficult for Web3 companies getting expensive licenses and monetising them, and this has been reflected by the number of deals that have been renegotiated in 2024, between these larger digital vendors and their licensors. These licenses are only affordable by a select few in the crypto industry, and they have used that leverage to renegotiate deals.

Data is the new oil — is the phrase many readers will have heard.

But data on the internet right now has been controlled, stored and siloed by a few select monopolistic operators which inhibits many incumbent brands from creating direct-to-customer relationships, especially those reliant on rented audiences.

This is especially true for sports entities, as many are finding out. Sports has a huge gap in knowledge in the most crucial part of their product; fans.

Most rights holders do not know their fans well enough, if at all. When speaking to some execs — it’s spreadsheets at worst and decayed CRM systems at best. When you consider 99% of fans globally do not go to the live event, this increasingly becomes a huge issue.

With the game going fans now tapped out from a monetisation perspective and broadcast revenues starting to level out, the three opportunities for increased future revenue are:

These are all impacted when you know very little about your global, digital fanbase.

So why blockchain and why now?

I was lucky to get some insight from Sandy Khaund, CEO of Credenza on this topic.

He says:

And when looking more deeply at sports, he says:

Blockchain, until this point, has been looked at as a revenue-driving tool for rights holders in the orthodox way they are used to; licensing.

The next iteration, as Sandy puts it blockchain 3.0 — will make the tech more ingrained and unlock untapped revenue opportunities for rights holders by simply solving the issue that teams, leagues and sports brands have faced over the last decade; knowing their fans.

Indeed in our latest podcast with Mark Epps Web3 & Comms director at the ATP Tour, he said:

Just over 2 years ago, FTX were the fastest-growing crypto exchange in the world and were spending frivolous amounts of money on sports sponsorships. 

NBA’s Miami Heat’s stadium was called the FTX arena, in a 19-year, $135 million deal. sports superstars Tom Brady, Steph Curry, Naomi Osaka and Shohei Ohtani were all sponsored athletes. FTX became MLB's first-ever umpire uniform patch partner, featuring the FTX logo on umpire uniforms.

When FTX unravelled, it instigated a bear market in crypto broadly — and thus had a big impact on crypto sponsorships in sport.

2 years on, and the sponsorship numbers have rebounded, consolidating at least in the volume of deals, and there are as many flagship partnerships as we saw in 2022.

Commercially speaking, the sports industry has been greatly impacted by crypto’s rise to the mainstream. 

For obvious reasons, deal value metrics are very noisy and are often based on second and third hand information, and thus in this report, we will focus on deal volume. 

There are some additional parameters that we have used to make the stats below focus on companies that only supply crypto services. For example – Revolut, Nubank or eToro are all businesses that provide crypto services, but not exclusively crypto services. 

Since 2018, this is how many crypto partnerships there have been in sport:

As you can see from this graph, in previous years the number of deals has correlated to, with a slight lag, the broader crypto market. But 2024 has seen a consolidation since 2023, whereas the crypto market cap has more than tripled. This may just be a lag and 2025 will see a huge increase in volumes, or it could be the case that crypto businesses are being a lot more concentrated in the partnerships they go after. Additionally, it could be the case that the value of the deals in 2024 is higher than in previous years, although as previously mentioned it’s difficult to ascertain those details.

In 2024, the landscape was dominated by football (soccer) with 60 of the 89 deals happening in this sport. Cricket was second with 7 deals, followed by Motorsport with 4.

A large reason for the dominance by football has been due to Sorare and Socios renewals or new deals, but those only account for 24 of the 60 deals in football.

Zondacrypto a a crypto asset exchange, and Kraken Digital Asset Exchange have both been new entrants into the sponsorship market and have also focused their efforts on football. Crypto[dot]com are an incumbent brand at this point and are still using sports as their main go-to-market strategy, with their flagship partnership being with the UEFA Champions League in 2024.

Overall, 46% of sports crypto deals were done by 6 businesses, showing that this market has become increasingly concentrated.

Part of the reason for this, and the decline in total deals struck is likely due to the move away from traditional brand-only deals being done.

Sean Thornley, Co-founder of Pindrop Sport says:

Blockchain Gaming became a key driver of consumer engagement onchain. It went from being an incredibly hyped consumer category to something that began to finally show some traction. 

Key Data Points:

Most notable in this category has been the launch of ‘Off The Grid’ – a triple A Battle Royale Game that has its own blockchain built on the Avalanche Network - called Gunz. 

The game is native to console and all users are auto-generated a wallet when they create an account. 

The chain - Gunz - is still in testnet (beta) but the topline numbers are remarkable.

Although many have rightfully questioned how sustainable the numbers are due to the huge marketing budget the game has had to play with, the numbers are strong — and it is a big moment in the blockchain gaming industry.

As Jamie King, CMO of Minutes Network & Co-Founder of Rockstar Games puts it:

Games like Off The Grid are more inspirations rather than directly impactful to sports, but serve as an example that Blockchain Gaming is petering into the mainstream.

Considering how much of the gaming market is sports-focused (Think EA, 2K, Racing games) it’s pertinent to explore this market’s explosive growth in 2024.

One Web3 Ssorts game has had a real impact, however, and that is NFL Rivals. 

NFL Rivals is a mobile game that allows players the opportunity to collect and trade officially licensed NFL player NFTs, built by Mythical Games.

The NFTs in the game are player cards used to build out teams and compete in the game. Each player card has different rarity levels from common to legendary. 

The numbers NFL Rivals have generated to date are strong. Since its debut in April 2023 they have seen:

The chain that NFL Rivals runs on, Mythos, is consistently a top 3 chain in terms of NFT volumes, and the majority of that volume is from NFL Rivals alone.

This has unlocked a new realm for sports rights holders, showing that they can create awesome experiences with blockchain as the underlying technology for their fans.

As Jamie puts it:

Mythical Games have found a way of innovating the gaming business model through ownable assets, driving strong volumes and revenues and creating a large captive audience.

They are looking to replicate this with FIFA, after announcing in late 2024 that they will create a FIFA Rivals game, the first license FIFA has handed out since their divorce from EA. It will be interesting to see how that game develops when it launches in 2025.

Other notable announcements include the PGA TOUR developing a Web3 Interactive game in collaboration with Stratton Studios and Chain Games Ireland.

2024 was the year that blockchain gaming became mainstream, and was something that the sports industry could no longer ignore.

After the FTX collapse, there were fears in the industry that it would take years for crypto to recover in the eyes of regulators.

That has turned out to be wrong, and 2 years on from the crypto exchange’s demise – we now have large global banks working with major exchanges regularly, and many of these exchanges have flourished since.

One thing it had a major influence on, however, is regulation.

On June 30, 2024, the new Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) regulation in the European Union, went into effect. This required many exchanges and stablecoin providers to change their ways of working and has created definitions for crypto assets stipulating that they are a representation of value digitally.

2024 also saw the SEC as well have stepped up their impact on the industry, regulating by enforcement, with Opense, Coinbase and Crypto[dot]com all receiving Wells notices. Although with then chair Gary Gensler stepping down, the mood music has changed late in the year.

In the UK, the FCA introduced the Finprom rules for cryptoassets, causing some businesses to shut down operations completely, and also announced that cryptoasset regulations would be created in effect by 2026.

By the end of the decade, this asset class should be regulated by most territories on the planet and 2024 was a huge year for that progression.

This has not had a huge impact on sponsors, offshore or onshore, as they have mostly found ways to tweak sponsorships to comply with regulations.

However, many partnerships that require fans to have wallets, hold NFTs or generally have the tech engrained into existing tech stacks — have found some difficulties in ensuring they are legally compliant, or generating propositions with little legal risk.

Fundamentally, the volatile regulatory environment in the US and Europe has impacted the speed at which major sports brands and leagues can develop blockchain propositions. 

There have been numerous activations, I’m sure, that have been built to the point of launch before being obliterated by legal review.

Most notably in 2024, we have seen some huge headlines, particularly in the U.S, that have created some precedent.

Dapper Labs for example agreed to a $4m settlement in a class action securities suit, which claimed that their Top Shots moments were securities.

In August of this year, the NFLPA sued DraftKings over $65m in unpaid Reignmakers NFT licensing fees, after the platform decided to shut down — who indeed cited ‘legal developments’ as one of the key drivers for their closure. This came a month after a class action lawsuit was brought against DraftKings claiming, like the Dapper Labs case, that Reignmakers NFTs are unregistered securities.

In November 2024, NBA Legend Shaquille O’Neal agreed to pay a $11m settlement, after he promoted an 'Astrals NFT’ project.

Regulation and settlements were huge in 2024, and will continue to be a hot topic in years to come.

It was Web3 Loyalty season in 2022 and 2023 in terms of where the industry was going from a brand perspective. But looking back at 2024, we have seen Starbucks and Nike shut down their Web3 platforms Odyssey and .SWOOSH respectively, with Nike also shutting down RTFKT, who they acquired in December 2021.

Whilst these were largely for macro and crypto market reasons (I.e stock prices plunging and NFT market consolidating) – the fact of the matter is that these loyalty products failed to make significant revenue, revenue that would justify their continuation. 

However, we have seen a new wave of Web3 Loyalty solutions, especially in sport, that may show green shoots in this part of the industry.

When Nike launched .SWOOSH, it felt like a watershed moment for the industry.

Fast forward to 2024, and it feels like there needs to be a reimagination of what it looks like to create a Web3 loyalty program.

Indeed, sports as an industry is unique in the sense that loyalty is inherent and generational, and the lifetime value of the customer is high because the relationship with a team is lifetime.

We saw the likes of the Cleveland Cavaliers launch a Web3 loyalty program called Cavs Rewards, which engages fans based on their participation, earning points from in-store purchases from partner locations, online purchases and in-venue purchases at arenas.

2024 also saw MLS launch MLS Quest, a “Gamified Digital Collection Experience”, which centres around the collection of in-game highlights.

Fans can participate for free by visiting official “MLS Quest Pick Up Zones”, found online and in physical locations throughout North America. Participants can find ‘Medallions’ at these “Pick Up Zones”, which reveal a key play from a specific MLS match. After fans collect all four medallions from a match, they will have completed a quest that unlocks a reward. It merges a fan engagement platform, digital collectibles and a gamified easter egg hunt into one proposition.

From a media perspective, we’ve also seen OneFootball, who have launched OneFootball Club (OFC), a digital proposition that rewards football fans for their passion and engagement. Fans can join the OFC to earn XP, badges, and rewards by interacting with the OneFootball app, gamifying their experience. It is built on Base in partnership with Animoca Brands and fans can also claim their own '.Football ID’ - as part of creating a profile on OFC.

Many presumed that the failures of huge names like Nike and Starbucks, as well as pivots by many sports teams and leagues meant that Web3 loyalty had no future in the consumer stack, but the second half of 2024 has certainly seen some interesting developments at the team, league and media level that show some green shoots in blockchain enabled loyalty.

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