It has been a strong year for NFTs and the world of sports. Increased interest from players and teams has pushed sponsorship deals and increased player adoption of cryptocurrencies.
For sport, the digital asset and virtual space are ideal avenues to drive fan engagement.
While interest is in a wide range of sports disciplines, the National Basketball Association (NBA) has been particularly progressive in the digital assets space.
The NBA is ready to launch the NFT collection “The Association
Later today, the NBA will launch its new Ethereum (ETH) based NFT collection, titled The Association.
The collection will consist of 75 NFTs per player for all teams in the 2022 NBA playoffs. This is a total of 18.000 NFTs.
According to the announcement:
"The Association is a collection of dynamic NFTs that change their appearance over time based on team and player performance on the pitch."
The announcement goes on to say:
“The Association's NFTs were issued in a blind-mint, meaning no one will know which NBA 2022 playoff player they will receive before the April 22nd reveal.
Players will be assigned randomly and transparently using Chainlink (LINK) VRF so that everyone will have a fair and equal chance to coin any player out of the 16 playoff teams ”.
The Association is an innovative project, with NFTs "linked to live data feeds and calculations for each respective team and player via Chainlink Oracle."
The link supports automatic change of the appearance of the players based on “preset results which are written in the Galaxis smart contract”.
The NBA Top Shot NFT market gets strong support from the NBA
In 2020, the NBA and Dapper Labs launched the NBA NFT Top Shot market, built on the Flow (FLOW) blockchain.
Moving towards the NBA playoffs, the NBA has expanded its loyalty to Web3 to drive community engagement.
This week, the NBA launched NBAxNFT, an NBA Discord for engaging with NBA fans on all things Web3.
The launch coincided with the playoff team, the Golden State Warriors (GSW), launching a collection of NFTs for the 2022 playoffs on the FTX NFT market.
The Golden State Warriors 2022 Playoff NFT Collection is a limited collection of 2.000 NFTs, randomly assigned at the time of minting on the Solana blockchain (here you can find out the quotation of SOL in real time) via FTX. Each design has a unique level of rarity with its own usefulness and benefits.
