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
21NF - Orc - Concept
Concept for 21NF.
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.
Poem by Dainagon Tsunenobu, from the series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, Explained by the Nurse
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) Poem by Dainagon Tsunenobu, from the series One Hundred Poems by One Hundred Poets, Explained by the Nurse late 1830s - Japan
Fuku-Shiva
The term “Fuku” refers to fortune or good luck. “Shiva” refers to the Hindu deity who represents strongly polar qualities, both severe and delicate. On a beach inspired by adventures on Phi Phi island in Thailand, three youths cavort. Two are representational figures and the third is psychologically rendered. A dynamic relationship ensues between the triad; a reciprocity of active and passive states. The boy on the right engages in maneuvers of evasion, defense, and is dressed in a speedo which reiterates the colors and symbolism of the caution tape on the left and upper right frame of the composition. In concurrent reaction the psychedelic figure shoots out a rocket powered paper airplane. The nude boy seated in the froth and sand approaches in passive repose, and is met with active attention but equal physical reserve by the psychedelic being. Perhaps the most naked figure is also the least representational. Looming large, dynamic, and active, it engages its companions playfully. Various symbols interject into the otherwise naturalistic scene, most notably a beach ball and two contaminated barrels nested in the sand. The upright barrel reads “FukuShima” in Kanji. The barrel laying down reads “Dharma”. To the left the scene is bounded by caution tape, reiterating the danger of the nuclear waste while also hosting alien archetypes, whose presence, as is the nature of these entities, runs up and just behind the consciousness of the psychedelic figure’s eggshell-like skull.
trump 2020
This is a photo i took of my son playing around in one of our cat carriers, redressed to express the concern and damage the continuation of the trump administration could bring to the world in 2020 and beyond. Unlike the majority of my historic work found on opensea, all content was conceived and taken by me, so felt perfect to use as my first piece on Known Origin.