The latest foray of the National Basketball Association is the joint venture with the NFT platform Sorare that will oversee the development of a fantasy-like game that will feature non-fungible tokens and many elements of meta-play of digital card collecting games allowing players to use their favorite player cards as valuable, tradable tokens that will be appreciated due to scarcity and inherent usability in the game.
NBPA will represent the league and its players
US-based association for basketball players in the NBA (NBPA) will partner with the Parisian company Sorare which has been quite active in the blockchain industry and forayed into the NFT concept. Now, the blockchain development firm will be building a Fantasy NBA Game that will implement NFTs as one of the core gameplay elements.
As announced by the NBA, the game will be focused on building lineups of players with collectibles representing players from the association. These virtual teams will accumulate points based on how well real players will perform in their games. The basketball association is not the first entity to explore this idea. The MLB announced the same partnership in July. Sorare has a functional product that has been tested during partnerships with Bundesliga and La Liga which are still going strong.
Sorare already has a massive audience of 2 million sports fans from over 185 countries and all inhabited continents.
The game will be ready for this competitive season
It seems that the development has been going strong since the beginning of this year because the game will be available to players before the start of the 2022-2023 competitive season to allow fans to load up on NFTs and build teams to participate in the first games with their rosters already prepared.
Note that NBA makes this interesting move after its previous successful foray into the world of NFTs with their platform Top Shot which allows players to purchase memorable moments as collectibles and trade them on open marketplaces. Top Shot managed to reach an impressive $1 billion milestone in May, before the collapse of the NFT market. However, even amidst the crypto winter, the Top Shot collection sees over $98K daily trading volume.
