Issue 18: Betting giant joins, Bball NFTs, Bugs Bunny & co.

Here's your weekly review on what happened at the intersection of NFTs and Sports:

• 💰 DraftKings launches NFT platform and partners with Brady's Autograph
• 🏀 Basketball NFTs from the Bulls, the Raptors and the G League
• 👾 Space Jam and more NFTs

Let's have a closer look! 👀

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And yes, we are back from our summer break, let's see what happened in the meantime...

💰 DraftKings launches NFT platform and partners with Brady's Autograph

Betting giant DraftKings announced the launch of their very own NFT platform. And it will kick off with a very special cooperation. They will be the exclusive distributor of the NFTs from Tom Brady's NFT platform Autograph about which we talked in a previous article already. Autograph themselves just announced an impressive lineup of so-called "Founding Partner" in Tiger Woods, Naomi Osaka, Derek Jeter, Wayne Gretzky, Tony Hawk and Lionsgate.

Our take: On the first look it seems like a win-win. DraftKings has an audience of over 1.5 million monthly subscribers who they can advertise the platform to. And Autograph has an impressive portfolio of stars, which we assume will only grow over time. Let's see how attractive the actual NFTs will be for fans and investors!

🏀 Basketball NFTs from the Bulls, the Raptors and the G League

Now that the NBA season has come to an end it seems like many teams and leagues are using the time to work on their NFT projects. Here's a quick overview:

The Chicago Bulls have launched a championship series commemorating their legendary team from the 90s. That itself is nothing special yet, as "legacy collection" have become fairly common. The interesting angle though is their partnership with ecommerce giant Shopify who recently integrated the NFT platform Sweet into their offering. Once fully rolled out this will make it easy for Shopify customers to include NFTs to their portfolio. We've been following the drops and the items get sold out within minutes, so it seems to be successful on the fan side. Also the Shopify integration can be very powerful for a team or whoever wants to issue NFTs, as they get a trustworthy tech partner. Even better if they are already running on Shopify.

The Toronto Raptors dropped their first official team NFT. The collection features six different areas, so-called "keys", that represent different aspects of the organisation: The City, the team, the player, the past, the future and the game, each split up in limited, rare and legendary NFTs. Each of them will unlock "exclusive perks, from first look access, signed game worn memorabilia and curated VIP experiences". It seems like the Raptors are following the playbook of successful NFT launches in the past, especially by including interesting experiences into the mix. Now it's up to the fans to decide how valuable they are!

The NBA G League announced their inaugural NFT collection. Interestingly not much news or details can be found around this topic, so we're left a bit in the dark here. But hey, we know it's coming and so do you now :) We'll keep an eye on this for you...

👾 Space Jam and more NFTs

Even during the summer month the NFT sports scene keeps delivering. Besides the already mentioned one other project stood out for us.

Space Jam showed us how NFTs can be used as a marketing instrument without seeing it as a revenue driver. For the launch of the movie they minted 91,000 NFTs who could either be claimed for free through a signup and/or for $2.99 per piece. All of the NFTs were off the market within a short amount of time and brought some joy to their new owners. As a side effect Space Jam now has access to this pool of NFT owners, giving them options to upsell or launch other collections. We do like this approach. Let's see if they have a second step in mind.

And there were a couple more NFT news around Copa America, UEFA 2020, Wolfsburg, Sacramento Kings, etc., but as always we want to keep it short and simple in our newsletter. Feel free to check them out yourself, we have linked them for you.

🤓 Wrapping it up

So what have we learned in this week's issue?

• A big audience combined with the access to valuable athletes/rights is a mix that has been successful for quite a while now, so it's no surprise that DraftKings and Autograph are joining forces
• Convenience and compatibility are appreciated in the NFT world as well, as the Chicago Bulls and Shopify cooperation shows. Must be good to know to have a big tech partner on your side when it comes to a rather complex topic like NFTs.
• NFTs are not only there to make money, they can also be used to truly engage fans and build a relationship with them. Space Jam's (mostly) free NFT collection is a nice approach in this area.

That's it for this weeks issue! And as always: Feel free to reach out for feedback and to discuss all things NFT and sports! And to stay up to date: Make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for stats, drop announcements and more. And join us on our Discord server to discuss the latest news and insights about NFTs in sports.