Giannis Antetokounmpo NFT sells for record $187K on Sorare NBA

Rare NBAan officially licensed and NFT-powered fantasy basketball game, set a new milestone on Sunday when a 1/1 NFT of Giannis Antetokounmpo sold for USD 187,000 in ETH— by far the highest sales for the relatively young platform.

The single edition Antetokounmpo NFT was auctioned off through Sorare NBA’s own Ethereum-based platform this weekend and sold for approximately 113.9 ETH, or just over $187,000. That tripled the sale price in USD from the previous top sale: an Anthony Davis NFT that sold for over $62,000 (nearly 49 ETH at the time) in December, per data from CryptoSlam.

It is also the largest known sale of any Giannis Antetokounmpo NFT. On NBA top shotDapper Labs’ video aggregator platform on Flow blockchainis the largest chain sale for the NBA championship-winning Bucks star $95,000 in a February 2021 transaction. It is tied for The 16th largest Top Shot sale in the chain to date.

But compared to physical trading card sales, even Sorare NBA’s best can’t match the athlete’s top grade. A signed Giannis Antetokounmpo rookie card – with a piece of game-worn jersey embedded in the card –sold for over 1.8 million dollars in September 2020. It briefly held the record for the most expensive basketball trading card sale.

Sorare NBA sales are significant for a platform that only launched in October, plus come after several months of declining sales and prices for the broader NFT market. NBA Top Shot, for example, hasn’t seen such high NFT sales in nearly two years.

However, the NFT market had an increase of 38% in January in month-over-month organic trading volume, per data from DappRadar, suggesting increasing momentum for the space. The NFT market itself has only been around for a few years, only gaining mainstream interest and notoriety in early 2021.

In comparison, sports trading cards have been collected, traded and sold for decades, and prices for top cards skyrocketed amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The most expensive card ever sold – a 1952 Mickey Mantle baseball card – was auctioned for $12.6 million in August 2022. The current top selling basketball card is a Steph Curry card which sold for $5.9 million in July 2021.

Sports collectibles have been a prominent use case for NFTs, which are blockchain tokens that represent ownership of a unique item. Used for things like digital trading cards, artwork, profile pictures (PFPs) and video game items, the NFT market has amassed over $25 billion worth of organic NFT sales over each of the last two years.

NBA Top Shot helped introduce NFTs into the mainstream in 2021, generating more than $1 billion in secondary market sales to date. However, the bulk of these sales occurred in the early months of 2021. Top Shot’s highest single NFT sale occurred in April 2021, when a LeBron James collectible sold for nearly $388,000 in an off-chain auction house transaction.

Sorare is best known for its NFT based fantasy football gamebut have since added Major League Baseball and NBA spinoffs.

Across all three platforms, Sorare has yielded over $545 million in trading volume to date, per data from CryptoSlam. The top sale on Sorare’s primary football platform was an NFT card for star player Erling Haaland, who sold for 265.1 ETH (almost $679,000) in January 2022.