MLB remains focused on creating collectibles with Candy Digital as more leagues enter the market

Candy Digital continues to work with MLB to create the NFTS and sold out all five collections at the start of the season.Courtesy of Candy Digital

While the cryptocurrency market is still reeling from the bankruptcy of FTX and the struggles of other exchanges, collectible NFTs may be on the rise. Decrypt, a leading publication covering the crypto and NFT industry, reported that NFTs surged to $2 billion in transactions in February – an astonishing 117% increase from January and the highest since the May crash of the Terra exchange that started the crypto implosion of 2022. In March, Decrypt reported that it saw $1.95 billion in transactions, down just 4% from its February increase.

Candy Digital is an NFT partner with Major League Baseball, signing their first deal together in 2021, and the recent selling point towards that increase. The company said over the past five weeks it has sold out all five collections:

■ NFTs commemorating the first hits of Cardinals lefty Jordan Walker (118) sold out in an hour and Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe (100) sold out in a minute.

■ This week’s digital collectible plays (think baseball cards, but for plays, not players) both sold out, with the April 3rd release lasting five minutes and the April 10th release lasting 15 minutes.

■ MLB Showstopper player packs sold out within five minutes on March 29.

Candy Digital CEO/COO Scott Lawin said the takeaway from these quick selloffs isn’t so much about speculation, like what happened with cryptocurrencies and the NFT boom in 2021, as it is about fundraising.

“What that tells us is that your fans and your customers and your collectors are much less focused on the vagaries of the cryptocurrency market and they’re much more interested in what they see as the future of fundraising and the future of connecting with the teams, with the athletes and with the stories they love,” Lawin said. “The collector’s mindset of opening that pack, that digital pack of icons, that mindset of having a collectible that commemorates your experience in a game or an important moment in sports, that’s really independent of where crypto trades.”

This is what Kenny Gersh, MLB’s executive vice president, media and business development, envisioned when the idea of ​​blockchain-based tokens like NFTs first began to intrigue him in 2007-08. In 2018, MLB launched MLB Champions, an early NFT mobile game from blockchain developer Lucid Sight (it also issued NFT tokens for the Dodgers). In Champions, you played with little bobblehead-style figures, linked to third-party wallets like OpenSea and MetaMask. It shut down in 2020 as it struggled to gain traction in the casual market (one of the most challenging to crack in all of gaming). One lesson Gersh took away from that was that people didn’t want to handle wallets for their NFTs.

“We didn’t quite know what the market wanted yet, or the fans weren’t quite ready for it. So it wasn’t really a mass success, but we learned a lot about it,” Gersh said. “From that experience, I learned what the potential was to create these kinds of assets. And so I think what we’ve done with Candy is kind of build that slowly, the building blocks for fan adoption and give them an easy way to buy digital assets .”

The big takeaway from MLB Champions for Gersh: Don’t tie up assets to wallets and cryptocurrencies. Candy Digital uses the Palm blockchain (which takes Ethereum), but it has its own infrastructure for storing tokens without third-party wallets. Those who want the tokens can also make purchases with a credit card, “buying things like they would normally buy baseball cards or other collectibles,” Gersh said.

Early investments, future payouts?

Gersh is one “big believer” in Web3, what industry insiders see as the next evolution of the internet, where blockchain technology helps secure not only currencies and items, but also enables users to take them from one region of the web to another (including virtual worlds such as metaverse). MLB and companies like Candy Digital, Sweet and Ticketmaster are experimenting with ways to turn tickets into NFTs, which fans can use as collectibles not only to show they were at a game, but also to solidify memorable moments (like Volpe’s first hit, especially the designated Yankee would become a Hall of Famer one day).

But take this idea further and attach these NFTs to a physical item, like Kolex does with their T-shirts.

“I think there’s a future where token-based or token-gated access to goods and experiences and content will become more mainstream and important,” Gersh said. “So if you’re a holder of a certain number of tokens, and by tokens I don’t mean cryptocurrency … we can then tell that, OK, you now have a digital wallet that has these particular tokens or NFTs. And for that to we’ll reward you with a free month of MLB.tv.”

Leagues and teams can also do this to give away other merchandise in partnership with other brands, using NFT tickets as a special incentive to bag a limited item. And this is something Candy Digital hopes to do in the future as well, blurring the lines between the digital token and a physical object.

“Our digital ticketing products are a great example,” Gersh said. These are commemorative tickets for people who go to certain MLB games. Ultimately, the digital ticket should be something that can unlock an experience at the stadium. It can give you a discount on items and over time, for people who register their participation by going to games, give them special rewards of digital rewards as well as physical rewards.

One day, go to enough games and check in with your NFT pass, and you might get not only a signed Volpe collectible, but a photo as well. These are the types of experiences sports leagues and businesses are looking at for the future.