22/07/2021 Sports NFTs Are Becoming a Hot Commodity

By 

Fang Block 

Sports NFT platform Sorare partnered with Goldin Auctions to offer digital trading cards of the starting 11 players on the Belgian and French national soccer teams.

Courtesy of Goldin Auction
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It seems sports fandom has been transported into the digital world.

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On Tuesday, it was reported that Lineal by Tyson Fury, a sports NFT featuring the lineage of the British professional boxer bare-knuckle brawling and boxing, sold for nearly US$1 million at auction.

Following this sale, Tom Brady’s NFT platform Autograph announced that it has signed exclusive deals with an all-star roster of athletes and partnerships with movie studio Lionsgate and online gaming company DraftKings.

NFTs are pieces of digital content recorded on blockchain, blocks that contain cryptographic information that could not be modified. NFTs as collectibles have been on the rise especially since Christie’s record US$69 million sale of an artwork by the digital artist Mike Winkelman, known as Beeple. 

In the meantime, sports NFTs, which can include digital trading cards, signed sports memorabilia, or video clips, continue to grow in popularity. Winkelman himself is a co-founder of a company that is selling NFTs that include sports memorabilia, beginning with Andy Murray’s 2013 Wimbledon victory. 

Tyson’s NFT fetched US$987,000 via an auction at HoDooi that closed last Friday, making it one of the biggest sale of sports NFTs in history. The price smashed the US$200,000 paid for NBA star LeBron James's slam dunk NFT, and the nearly US$300,000 sale of a Cristiano Ronaldo NFT, both in March. 

The 43-year-old football icon Brady co-founded Autograph this spring. On Wednesday, the company said it has signed exclusive NFT deals with current and former athletes representing sports from golf to tennis, from ice hockey to skateboarding, including Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, Derek Jeter, Naomi Osaka, and Tony Hawk, who will also join the Autograph’s advisory board.

In addition, Autograph has entered into partnership with Lionsgate, the major motion picture and television studio, and DraftKings, a digital sports entertainment and gaming company. 

While Lionsgate will offer Autograph exclusive access to NFTs from an array of iconic film and television properties, such as John Wick and The Hunger Games, DraftKings will provide the online marketplace for Autograph’s sports NFTs.

“The NFT boom has reinvented the collectibles industry and driven excitement to early-adopting audiences worldwide—including the DraftKings community,” Matt Kalish, DraftKings co-founder and president, said in a statement. “This initial vision in collaboration with Autograph, and its coveted collection of official digital collectibles, is a vital first step as we enter the emergent NFT market.” 

Earlier this week, another sports NFT platform, Sorare, announced its partnership with Goldin Auctions, a leading trading cards, collectibles, and memorabilia marketplace, to offer digital trading cards of the starting 11 players on the Belgian and French national soccer teams.

In April, the Golden State Warriors launched an NFT collection commemorating their NBA championships and most notable games, making them the first professional sports franchise to release a digital collection of this kind. 

“The digital collectibles excitement is palpable,” Warriors chief revenue officer Brandon Schneider said while announcing the sale. “We see NFTs and digitization of our business as a mainstay to engage our fans around the world.”

Arts

https://www.barrons.com/articles/sports-nfts-are-becoming-a-hot-commodity-01626902423

Interesting NFTs
Gunky's Uprising
Gunky's Uprising by SSX3LAU Slimesunday and 3LAU team up once again under their alias SSX3LAU for a collection featuring their first exploration into color. TBD is a full length music video featuring an unreleased song from 3LAU and Slimesunday\u2019s mesmerizing animation. In a first for the artists, TBD\u2019s collector will have the opportunity to name the song (some restrictions apply).
#56587
By OthersideDeployer
CryptoKitties
Good morning! I'm Kitty #427706. I'm a Culinary Sanitation Specialist by day, and I like people-watching by night. I am 66% oracle, 9% Ventriloquist, and otherwise bad at math. Can you make my preposterous dreams come true?
Alex in Wonderland
A figure, Alex, stands mostly naked in the midst of a physical and psychological maelstrom. He is clad only in nostalgic 80’s era socks, on a tenuous island between active waters and a variety of shark denizens. Sharks on the right side of the image are all beached, including a shark with a quartz crystal snout, an orange shark wrapped in a life buoy, and a shark further in the distance wearing an 80’s style shirt with the number “88”. On the left side is the largest shark, wearing bright glossy red lipstick and brandishing prominent teeth with braces. She is cordoned off from the figure by a roped float divider, and within her thought bubble is a warning symbol. Behind the figure, hovering in the air, are Grey aliens emerging from the distance, out of a series of elliptical UFO shaped interdimensional membranes. The Greys take on the visual form of spermazoa ostensibly impregnating the interdimensional thresholds. As is typical, these Greys inhabit a zone just behind the unconscious topology of Alex’s dissociative mind. Though Alex’s bottom half is representative, his top half mutates into a psychological cornucopia. In a manner akin to “Auto-Erotic Sphinx”, a predecessor work, the figure has self suctioned—an act of sensual infatuation, enjoyment, and exploration. Upward exists the figure’s primary conscious eye, adorned with a revolutionary beret emblazoned with a Bitcoin badge. The figure’s summit features the nose of a fighter jet facing off against video game Bullet Bills, one of whom is marked by a communist North Korean star. A cropped section of a UFO observes the contest. Alex’s mind branches both left and right. To the left is more singular embodied consciousness, manifesting two eyes and a Ganesh trunk grasping crayons. The right branch dissociates upward diagonally, emerging into an array of eyes, faces, teeth, tail, a unicorn horn, and much more—all of which participate in expressing his unconscious being; a democracy of psychic factions representing thought impressions and associations. All illumination and darkness– fernal, infernal, high consciousness and corporeal underbelly–reside in this realm. In the distance are relatively languid, light clouds, and against the firmament hovers a colossal distant eye peering over the scene and far beyond. This painting possesses underlying genetic traits with previous works such as “Auto-Erotic Sphinx with Toys”, “Dionysus”, and “Fuku-Shiva”. The work serves also as a nod to an earlier period of art inspiration during late teens and early twenties— born out of the nakedness, vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder inherent to coming of age and all subsequent psychedelic revelation.
Genesis
JosĂ© Delbo sent me his striking pencil sketch and powerful inked work, which I then interpreted in oil on canvas. I wanted to create a very painterly piece with obvious brush marks etc, but I was also aiming for a nostalgic feel, a kind of 1980’s superhero comic book look, the kind I grew up with. My goal with this animation was to try to recreate, in part, the creative process that both artists went through with the visual information I had. I was able to showcase my painting process more accurately as I could take photographs of my progress throughout. Consecutive images could then be layered like brush strokes over José’s drawing to create the impression that this was one continuous artwork from pencil, to ink, to completed painting. The representation of the line sketch at the beginning, then pencil/ink and lastly the paint layers being applied demonstrate both artists’ struggle for the right lines, tone, form, and colour until the work is finally completed. As the oil was still wet with each photograph the glare of my studio lights can be seen in the brush strokes. Eventually, the figure emerges and as it does, our hero comes to life, looking directly at the viewer -- but is he grimacing in approval or disgust? We will never know for sure as just before he can say anything, white paint is brushed across the canvas entirely and the process begins again. Only the bat is quick enough to escape.