sorare – Pastel

It seems only yesterday when headlines of sports trading cards selling for millions of dollars spotlighted the lucrative world of collectible cards.

To recap the highest flying sales:

A 1952 Topps SGC 9.5 Mickey Mantle card sold for $12.6 million
A T206 SGC 2 Honus Wagner sold for $7.25 million
The LeBron James 2003-04 Rookie Patch Auto sold for $5.2 million.
Patrick Mahomes 2017 Rookie Auto BGS 8.5 sold for $4.3 million.
Luka Doncic 1:1 Logoman Auto sold for $4.6 million

And the list goes on, often to the incredulity of the average person still digesting the idea that even classical art can fetch multi-million dollar price tags.

Throw NFTs, these intangible digital collectibles, into the mix, and it seems people’s incredulity grows to almost shocked disbelief.

NFT sports cards were inevitable– attach the high value placed on limited edition collectible cards to a 24/7/365 digital marketplace, and you’ve got a powerful combination.

The following guide explores the ins and outs of NFT sports cards.

NFT Sports Cards 101: A Quick Summary of NFTs

To best understand how NFT sports cards work, it’s essential to firmly grasp the NFT concept.

A non-fungible token is a cryptocurrency that is unlike any other– hence its non-fungibility.

For most practical purposes, one bitcoin will always equal one bitcoin, in the same way, one quarter will always equal one quarter.

However, let’s say we have two houses with identical floorplans– but one is on the beach, and the other is in a regular suburb. In most markets, the beachfront house might be worth triple or even ten times the amount of its less-breezy twin.

Similarly, the NFT token standard enables tokens to hold unique characteristics– which are priced accordingly by the market.

The holder of the NFT owns what is essentially the deed to the digital trading card and can sell it whenever.

In more technical terms, the NFT owner holds the token in a cryptocurrency wallet; their private key is what signals to the blockchain that they are the owner of the wallet and its contents, enabling them to trade as they please.

There are no physical tokens or coins that represent the NFT– it’s all digital, and your private key is what communicates your ownership of the NFT.

Exploring the NFT Sports Card World

Today’s most popular NFT sports card platforms are essentially the issuers of a specific collection.

For example, NBA Top Shot is the officially licensed platform of NBA collectibles. NBA Top Shot project took the cryptocurrency world by storm when Dapper Labs launched it in October 2020, introducing many of its crypto-savvy collectors to the future of NFTs.

Dapper Labs is also known for its viral CryptoKitties project in 2017, seeing several CryptoKitties reach six-figure sales.

In addition to NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs also has NFL All Day and UFC Strike.

In just a few short months, NBA Top Shot attracted over $123 million in sales. In 2022, NBA Top Shot Labs reached over $1.03 billion in secondary market trades.

Dapper Labs takes a 5% royalty fee on secondary NFT sales of its marketplace; so, in theory, Dapper Labs made about $50,000,000 from its users trading its NFTs with each other.

In contrast to physical sports cards, NFT sports cards are able to include additional rarity features; NBA Top Shot uses different tiers like Legendary, Rare, Fandom, and Common.

NBA Top Shot introduced the most polished NFT sports experience in 2020, paving the road for several new NFT sports card marketplaces today.

SoRare is a competing NFT marketplace and issuer that initially started with football (of the round ball sort) NFTs, and has expanded to MBA and MLB NFTs.

However, in addition to purely holding SoRare cards for collection’s sake, collectors can play in twice-weekly global competitions or against friends in private leagues. Using the cards for their collections, players can submit either five-player lineups (for football & NBA) or a seven-player lineup (MLB) in free competitions.

SoRare players can also earn rewards such as digital player cards, merchandise, match tickets, ETH, or even meeting their star athletes– all based on their squad’s real-life performance– similar to a fantasy league.

NFT Sports Cards: Considerations

Chances are that one top question in your head comes from this line of logic: well, if seemingly anyone can launch an NFT, wouldn’t the market just become supersaturated with NFT sports cards, basically commoditizing the asset class?

Correct. However, this isn’t much different from how real-life companies can start pumping out specific trading cards, provided they have adequate licensing and legal agreements with the organizations.

Similarly, sports organizations tend to sign non-exclusive licensing agreements with NFT platforms– similar to how SoRare and NBA Top Shot are competing companies offering NBA NFTs. However, SoRare offers a gaming aspect, whereas NBA Top Shot seems to be strictly collection-oriented.

We can expect to see more NFT sports card marketplaces and issuers arise with different functionalities.

Autograph, for example, is a platform that enables famous athletes and celebrities to turn their real-life experiences into NFTs, giving them a direct link to add personal touches to the digital collectibles distributed to fans.

Rather than a simple static image or . GIF, Autograph NFTs are typically customized high-graphic digital representations, such as interactive posters, digital action figures of iconic game highlights, and more.

The Autograph team counts a star-studded array of celebrity athlete partners, like Tom Brady, Simone Biles, Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Wayne Gretzky, and Tony Hawk.

However, NFTs come with additional considerations their physical counterparts don’t.

For one, the underlying blockchain adds another distinctive category type. While the bulk of NFT sports cards (in terms of market share, volume, and popularity) are on Ethereum’s blockchain, there are competitors emerging on blockchains like Solana, Polygon, Flow, and even Cardano.

Final Thoughts: The Future of NFT Sports Cards

Bear or bull market, the underlying value proposition of NFT sports cards remains the same– collect digital assets representing your favorite athletes similar to how you’d collect physical cards.

With a few billion dollars in primary and secondary volume, NFT sports cards are a smaller yet still dominant representation of NFT’s potential.

It’s not a stretch to assume we’re in the early innings of how far NFT sports cards can go; platforms like NBA Top Shot, SoRare, and Autograph have raised and are implementing over a billion dollars of cumulative funding to build their NFT offering

However, potential NFT sports cards holders should be mindful their digital holdings come with more nuanced responsibilities, such as protecting your holdings from hackers (and yourself) with adequate cryptocurrency wallet security and digital hygiene– as well as the underlying risks of the very risky cryptocurrency world.

Sorare is a French blockchain startup building an NFT collectible game revolving around fantasy soccer (football)– not to be confused with American fantasy football.

The game consists of unique digital tradable cards of football players, some of which have attracted considerable market value. One such card of Christiano Ronaldo recently sold for $102,000, making it one of the top-selling digital collectible cards so far.

Sorare’s packs

Sorare currently has partnerships with 130 soccer clubs, blowing its initial goal of 20 clubs out of the water; the partnership list currently includes marquee names like Real Madrid, Liverpool, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, and Juventus. A platform like Sorare enables football clubs to better engage with a global fanbase of fans and collectors, who wish to purchase and collect Sorare Cards.

Sorare Cards are officially licensed digital collectibles of soccer players in a particular soccer season. The cards are freely tradeable and usable. There are three levels of scarcity for each Sorare Card: Unique, Super Rare (10 copies) and Rare (100 copies).

About Sorare: The Team

Sorare was founded by Nicolas Julia (Co-founder & CEO) and Adrien Montfort (Co-Founder & CTO.)

“Sorare was born from our love for football. We’re building a gaming experience fueled by passion where fans can connect with football and a global community,” said Sorare CEO Nicolas Julia. “On Sorare, they can truly own the game.”

The company distinguishes itself in the rapidly-growing NFT collectible space with its prestigious roster of investors, counting participants such as Benchmark, Accel, Alexis Ohanian (Founder of Reddit), Gary Vaynerchuk, and Barcelona striker Antoine Griezmann.

Sorare on Crunchbase

Sorare has raised $59.2M to date, with the lion’s share (€40M, or $47.4M) coming in its Series A round led by Benchmark in February 2021. Early raises included a 2019 $500k pre-seed, which included Brooklyn-based Ethereum development studio ConsenSys, and a July 2020 $4 million seed round (later extended to $10 million) led by e.ventures.

The Sorare team announced that it has experienced its most rapid growth in late-2020 and early-2021, noting 52% month-over-month growth in early-2021. For example, about $4.2 million worth of cards were traded in January 2021, compared to just $60,000 of cards traded January 2020.

How Does Sorare Compare with Other Blockchain-based Collectibles?

Founded in December 2018, Sorare isn’t necessarily a new project on the block. It owes much of its recent rapid growth and attention to the cryptocurrency bull market and NFT boom of late-2020 and early-2021, but it is still rooted in a few more months of innovation than the average NFT collectible project.

It’s worth comparing Sorare to NBA Top Shot, a project by Dapper Labs, which also made the viral hit CryptoKitties. Similarly, NBA Top Shot is an NFT collectible platform, but with a partnership with the NBA. NBA Top Shot generated over $200 million in transactions in 2021, and has a bustling secondary marketplace.

Although Sorare’s $4.2 million January sales might pale in comparison to NBA Top Shot’s numbers, it’s worth noting that Sorare has been comparatively significantly undercovered. Of NBA Top Shot’s $200 million, nearly $150 million was within a one-week span following a barrage of media hype and coverage.

It also seems that NBA Top Shot has a bit more thoughtful approach to monetization– it takes 5% of every market sales, including the high-volume high-value secondary market. Sorare currently only makes money on card auctions, and not on secondary sales.

Although NBA Top Shot is a bit more mature than Sorare (it had already signed the NBA as a partner before Sorare raised its pre-seed,) there is no need to force a zero-sum comparison between the two projects.

Sorare Competition

Sorare is a Parisian startup, and is the leading blockchain company working on a NFT solution for soccer collectibles. We’ll gently remind our readers that soccer is the most popular sport in the world; it has an estimated 4 billion fans worldwide, in comparison to an estimated 825 million basketball fans– basketball is also behind table tennis, at 875 million fans.

Sorare’s partnerships (source: Sorare home page)

Optimistically, Sorare is positioned favorably in the market: the bulk of the world’s most valuable and notable clubs based in Europe, and many of which are already partners with Sorare.

However, Sorare does have some competition:

Socios.com, a platform that primarily focuses on token trading token trading. It has partnerships with many of the same companies as Sorare, but it doesn’t offer NFT-based collectibles.
Animoca, a gaming studio, which scored a partnership with Manchester City teams. Animoca is also the creator of F1 Delta Time through a partnership with Formula 1.
Fantastec, a collectibles app.

Sorare’s competition has signed many of the same teams, and there doesn’t appear to be any exclusivity in its partnerships. This may drastically affects the perceived value of an NFT on Sorare,

Sorare Tech Stack

Sorare is currently using Ethereum, which has been experiencing frustratingly high transaction (gas) fees for the bulk of 2021.

Dapper labs learned the limitations of Ethereum’s scalability in 2017 and 2018, when its CryptoKitties game slowed the Ethereum network down to an extremely slow grind. It has since moved to Flow, a new blockchain that seems to be better for NFTs.

How to Buy NFTs on Sorare

Sorare has a partnership with Ramp, a cryptocurrency startup that facilitates KYC and payments. Ramp processes users’ KYC using open-banking APIs, removing some of the complexity and hurdles of signing up for the end-user.

Users can buy cards on Sorare either directly from Sorare or on the secondary marketplace from other users.

Final Thoughts

Sorare is attempting to tap into one of the most lucrative sports marketplaces by building an NFT-marketplace. As seen with NBA Top Shot, there is plenty of room and opportunity for a project like Sorare to take off, branding itself into the popular lexicon of digital sports collectibles.

It’s worth re-emphasizing that a firm like Benchmark not only invested in but led a funding round for Sorare. Benchmark is gilded in the venture capital community for its early investment in eBay in the first dot com boom, and later investments in companies like Instagram, Dropbox, Twitter, Uber, Zillow, Snapchat, and Discord.

However, NFTs still present an incredible risk, both for their customers and for their investors. As with most projects at the tip of the cryptocurrency innovation spear, time will tell how this story will be told in retrospect. If Sorare is able to solidify its leadership, make its roster of partners happy, and maintain card value over long horizons, it may be onto something big.

Tag: sorare

NFT Sports Cards Explained (Read Before Buying)