OneFootball and Animoca Brands have teamed up to create a football-focused digital asset repository, the company announced on April 28th. Both have formed a joint company named OneFootball Labs with seed financing source Liberty City Ventures to create the markets.
Yat Siu, president and CEO of Animoca would be joining the boards of directors of both the Animoca Brands and OneFootball, according to a news statement from Animoca. The news follows OneFootball’s completion of a $300M late-stage investment deal, wherein Animoca was a participant.
Animoca Will Be in Charge of the Football NFTs
Animoca and OneFootball want to exploit the latter’s roughly 100M monthly consumers for the future marketplace as part of the joint venture. Fan-created digital materials will be made available through the platform to football-related entities like federations, clubs, and leagues.
Animoca has a long history in the NFT arena, having invested in initiatives like as DapperLabs, The Sandbox, and OpenSea. There are a lot of popular intellectual assets that the company owns copyrights to. These include The Walking Dead, Disney, Snoop Dogg, WWE, and more!
NFTs are Becoming More Popular in Sports
Sports NFTs are one component of the media that has had a lot of success in the last year. They appeal to consumers outside of the blockchain field because they are considered more like digital collectibles than currencies. Sales of approximately $1B have been made since the introduction of Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shots marketplace, for example. Rario, a Cricket NFT platform, acquired $120M earlier in April to help the company grow.
With the fresh finance and collaboration with Dream, the company would then be able to sell cricket-themed NFTs to Dream’s 140M Indian users. According to a previous article, in light of India’s governmental scrutiny of cryptos, the site would only accept fiat currency, not cryptocurrency. Venture finance companies Kingsway and Presight and blockchain gaming giant Animoca Brands have previously invested in Rario.
According to the Singapore-based corporation, it has the world’s greatest proportion of cricket NFT rights. The Australian Cricketers’ Association and Cricket Australia have struck a multi-year, exclusive cooperation deal to promote its products. Cricket leagues worldwide have partnered with the business, which owns rights to around 900 cricketers. Rario claims to have sold more than 50K tokens, with the majority of those sales taking place in the US, India, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There are more than 1.5B people who follow cricket worldwide, according to Rario co-founder and CEO Ankit Wadhwa.
In other words, the business likens NFTs to digital collectibles and adds that this makes the field more than just an isolated trend in the industry. According to PwC, NFTs might potentially be used to authenticate tickets. Digital assets, according to the business, can dramatically change how supporters engage with their clubs.
