Sorare takes NBA top shot with Ethereum NFT-based Fantasy NBA game

Sorare’s Ethereum-based fantasy football platform helped spearhead the rise of both NFT games and digital sports collectibles, and the firm recently expanded into baseball with an official MLB game. Now, Sorare plans to step onto NBA Top Shots turf with the upcoming launch of an official NBA fantasy basketball game.

Created in partnership with the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), the platform will allow users to collect and spend Ethereum NFT cards based on professional players from the league. Similar to Sorare’s football and baseball games, users can create a lineup from their NFT players and participate in leagues that provide ETH and NFT card rewards to top performers.

As with these platforms, the NBA Platform will also provide a free-to-play experience for users who choose not to purchase NFTs. In the case of Sorare’s original soccer game, for example, new users receive a starter pack of free player cards that are not on-chain NFTs and cannot be resold.

Sorare plans to launch the NBA game in time for the upcoming 2022-23 season, which begins Oct. 18. Few concrete details have been revealed, but Michael Meltzer – Sorare’s head of business development – ​​told Decrypt that there will be some differences in card rarity levels and tournament scheduling based on the format and cadence of the pro hoops league.

Of course, Sorare is entering a much different area with its NBA platform, given the presence of NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs’ officially licensed, video-based NFT collector platform on Flow blockchain. Even more than Sorare, NBA Top Shot brought NFTs into the mainstream when it surged in popularity in early 2021, and so far has topped $1 billion on sale to date.

Sorare’s original soccer platform set the stage for official professional soccer NFTs, and while Major League Baseball had previous NFT projects—including digital cards with Topps and a fateful game before NFT market boom— The league had not given a giant like the NBA Top Shot.

Meltzer suggested that Sorare’s approach as an interactive game — rather than a platform primarily focused on collecting collectibles — would help differentiate the NBA platform from Dapper’s Top Shot.

“We don’t look at NFTs as a market – we look at NFTs more as a technology,” he said Decrypt. “We think we have a very unique offering and we have our own category that we have created through our [soccer] product. We believe our success to date will translate well to the NBA and is very different from anything on the market.”

An NFT is a blockchain token that can represent ownership of an item, such as sports collectibles, digital artwork, and video game items. In Sorare’s case, users buy digital trading cards based on real players, which can be used for fantasy matches against other users, as well as freely sold or traded on the game’s marketplace.

Meanwhile, the NBA has taken a multi-pronged approach to Web3, especially of late. It was the first major American sports league to enter the NFT space with Top Shot – an early bet that paid off big for a league known for being tech-savvy.

Since then, the league has launched its own NFT collectibles on Ethereum called Association, and recently debuted proof-of-participation tokens for the WNBA. NBA and WNBA too partnered with Coinbase last season in a multi-year agreement that was part of a greater 7300% increase in year-over-year spending on crypto sponsorships in the league.

Matt Holt, the NBA’s senior VP of global partnerships, said Decrypt that he believes the league is in the “very early days” of Web3 exploration. The NBA’s goal is not to oversaturate NFT efforts, he said, but rather to find different avenues to engage its young audience — more than half of which are under 35.

“We want to be very thoughtful about who we partner with and what types of products we put out there,” Holt said. “NBA Top Shot has been amazing, and will continue to be amazing. And our partnership with Sorare is a new, distinct NFT-based fantasy foray into space.”

Sorare has so far raised $421 million worth of NFT sales on the secondary market, according to data from CryptoSlam. The firm claims more than 2 million users in total, and said it saw 380,000 monthly active users in August.

Meanwhile, Sorare said that his MLB game has attracted a total of 90,000 users since its launch in July, with NFT sales worth $5 million as of September 1. Sorare last raised a Series B round of $680 million in September 2021, which valued the firm at $4.3 billion.