By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
The demand for NFT digital collectibles is not limited to sports and gaming. The market includes crypto artwork and other kinds of in-game items.
In a March 14 tweet, Sorare announced that a one-of-a-kind Christiano Ronaldo NFT trading card had sold for $289,920 over the weekend.
WOW! 🚀 Congratulations to FC Camembert who has just smashed our #Sorare Market record.
The Unique 2020-21 Cristiano Ronaldo card was bought for $289920 on the Transfer Market. #OwnYourGame ⚽️
Season: 2020-2021
Serial: 1/1
Price: $289920 pic.twitter.com/unLS9aXaN1— Sorare (@Sorare) March 14, 2021
Sorare is an Ethereum-based fantasy football game where players are available as non-fungible tokens.
The game’s NFTs are based on the Ethereum network. The players are used to in football matches and can be traded on a transfer market.
Sorare’s NFTs are available on three tiers. “Unique” features a single, one-of-a-kind card. “Super rare” has only ten of the same card while “rare” features only 100 of the same type of card. They also offer provable ownership and scarcity.
The Ronaldo NFT sale broke Sorare card sale records. It also superseded the Topps Erling Haaland physical card that sold for $124,230 to become the top-grossing football card ever sold physically and digitally.
The card was bought by a user called camembert, who had earlier this month purchased a unique Zinedine Zidane NFT.
Camembert had this to say:
“I would personally never buy a Picasso but I was very happy to invest $300,000 in my idol. Teenagers spend more than seven hours a day on a screen, so it seems natural that younger generations want to collect things online. Cristiano Ronaldo has five Ballon d’Or, is the first footballer billionaire, won five Champions League, and owns the largest Instagram account in the world with 270 million followers. He is also an example of discipline and will be a football legend forever.”
The Ronaldo Sorare NFT has been soon knocked off the top spot by NFL star Rob Gronkowski’s NFT. “Gronk” NFT sales closed Sunday night with $1.6M in NFT card sale. Amongst the cards sold was the “Career Highlight Refractor Card” which sold for 232 ETH (about $435,000). The card still falls short of a physical Patrick Mahomes rookie card that sold for $861,000 earlier this year.
The demand for NFT digital collectibles is not limited to sports and gaming. The market includes crypto artwork and other kinds of in-game items. There have been collectibles from music artists Grimes, Halsey and Kings of Leon and restaurant Taco Bell. Last week, digital artist Beeple made an astonishing $69M from the auctioning of a piece of crypto art.
DappRadar reports that Sorare’s trading volume surged late last month, coinciding with NBA Top Shot major headlines for its mammoth trading volume and sales. Sorare’s daily activity has since tapered off.
According to DappRadar, NBA Top Shot has had a trading volume of almost $309M in the past 30 days. Sorare’s trading volume over the same period is $21 million.
The fantasy football platform experienced continual growth throughout last year and into 2021 as it had has acquired over 120 total team/league licenses. These included major teams like Juventus and PSG. Sorare has wagered that increasing attention into a recent $50M Series A funding round, Alexis Ohanian and Gary Vaynerchuk as investors. Sorare has also gone on to collaborate with video game publisher Ubisoft for a spinoff game called One Shot League.