BLOCKSPORT: REVOLUTIONIZING SPORTS INDUSTRY THROUGH NFTs

Sports is a billion-dollar industry, with revenue streams erupting from different areas such as ticket sales, television rights, transfer and sale of players, and brand endorsement. Safe to say that Sports creates lots of opportunities for stakeholders and Sports enthusiasts.

Blockchain, like Sports, is making waves in recent times and disrupting all sectors, including the sports industry. However, a fundamental aspect of blockchain that is amazingly intriguing for the sporting industry is the Non-Fungible Token (NFT).

An NFT is a digital asset that represents real-world objects such as music, art, videos and games bought and sold online precisely with Cryptocurrency and encoded with the same underlying software as many Cryptos.

Just think of an NFT as something intangible, something you can’t hold in your hand, such as Walker’s digital art, or a unique video or Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, which fetched a 1,630.58 Ether, an equivalent of $2.9 million.

Non-fungible tokens (NFT), crypto certificates for digital works, have already shaken up the art market. Now they’re setting out to conquer the sports world. While the NBA is currently selling digitally signed video clips of game highlights for hundreds of thousands of US dollars, Nike is planning to sell digitally certified sneakers. ISPO.com answers the most important questions about NFTs and explains what role the technology could have for the sports business.

NFT MARKETPLACE by BLOCKSPORT

Our NFT platform can help artists with their design and use a back-end portal to manage their work. Our platform includes the artworks, list of athletes, celebrities, clubs, creator profiles, open actions, social feeds, trading history, easy minting and listing flow, collections. Lots of tech features are scheduled within our roadmap to ensure safety.

The Smart contracts at our platform follow the standards ERC 721, ERC 1155. We do IPFS integration via Penata service for establishing our own IPFS node. Currently, our team is working on adding smart contracts for admin roles, developing a smart contract for auction, preparing the smart contract’s integration to the front end, programming NFT royalty fee for NFT creator, setting platform fee for the marketplace, and off-chain auction.

WHAT ABOUT THE FUTURE OF NFTs IN SPORTS?

The adoption of blockchain can be seen across many industries, but perhaps nowhere is it happening faster than in the sports sector, with a very high user base in fans and other stakeholders. While many factors have led to the rise of blockchain, the advent of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and fan tokens are now driving growth in the professional sports world, both across the globe.

With players, teams, and leagues using NFTs, one concern that could be addressed is acting in collective bargaining agreements to limit their usage and reduce any legal jeopardy.

The MLB, for instance, following their collective bargaining agreement which ended on the 1st of December, 2020, covers ranging issues from NFTs with the belief that sooner than later, the entire sporting industry will utilize NFTs.

Since Arizona passed a bill to allow sports betting, the Phoenix Suns have reached an agreement with FanDuel to be the team’s official sportsbook and daily fantasy sports partner.

As NFTs and sports continue to intertwine, the future may hold both questions and answers, but until then, the rise and use of NFTs in sports are likely to continue as they become more mainstream.

Furthermore, with the development of the digital global economy, production, operation, consumption, entertainment, and lifestyles are rapidly undergoing a digital transformation. This has led to data becoming one of the most important assets in this new digital economy. Consequently, new challenges in data authentication and authorization have also become important issues to consider, and blockchain technology could play a significant role in alleviating these challenges.

NFTs offer countless potential applications for the sports business, as collecting plays a major role in fan culture. Fan Tokens are another strong use-case of blockchain technology in sports: majorly fungible utility tokens used on a given blockchain and offering fans access and influence over certain decisions by their most loved teams.

Although, unlike NFTs, Fan Tokens can be exchanged and traded similarly to cryptocurrency trading. Fan tokens have grown in popularity with fans since owners of fan tokens are stakeholders.