By
Chimamanda U. Martha
February 19th, 2024
The game developed by the NBA, Sorare, as well as National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), will be free-to-play. It is expected to roll out as soon as this fall, around the league’s regular season that opens on October 18.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) has decided to get deeper into the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) world and partnered with Sorare, a soccer fantasy trading game. Within the partnership, NBA and Sorare will launch an NFT-based fantasy basketball game. Notably, according to the terms of the deal, the NBA will receive an equity stake in Sorare.
NBA and Sorare Cooperation
In the game named “Sorare: NBA” users will be able to buy and sell NFTs, or identity cards, of individual players they create. Depending on how their players or teams perform, users will earn points.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver commented:
“Our partnership with Sorare will give NBA fans an entirely new way to engage with our teams and players. With Sorare’s emerging NFT fantasy platform, we see significant opportunities to broaden our community of fans and grow NBA basketball around the world.”
Sorare COO Ryan Spoon added:
“The way I would describe (the NBA partnership) is we are both very motivated to grow together and to make this as successful and broad and big as possible. That’s in all of our interests.”
The game developed by the NBA, Sorare, as well as National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), will be free-to-play. It is expected to roll out as soon as this fall, around the league’s regular season that opens on October 18.
For NBA, the deal with Sorare is not the first experience in the NFT world. Back in 2019, NBA teamed up with Dapper Labs to develop NBA Top Shot, an NFT marketplace that features “hand-picked” 20 individual moments from the 2020-2021 season and highlights each of the players chosen for the US Team and the World Team.
Sorare’s Expansion
It will be interesting to see how Sorare is going to attract more users. Being an Ethereum-based NFT platform that already offers digital collectibles for a fantasy soccer game to 2 million registered users across 185 countries, it has most of them based in Europe and Asia. Till now, Sorare had its partnerships mainly with soccer teams, including some European big names such as Real Madrid, Liverpool, and Juventus. Only 20% of Sorare users are based in the US, therefore, the partnership with NBA and NBPA will expand its business, adding basketball and baseball that are much more popular than soccer in the US, and attracting new users.
Last year, Sorare raised $680 million in a Series B funding round led by SoftBank. Following the round that was the largest ever for a European startup, its valuation reached $4.3 billion.