Web3 Weekly: 2024/10/19
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Hello 👋 Another week has gone by, we're looking at what has happened in terms of Web3.
Today, our party will be joined by:
⚽️🚘 Vfb Stuttgart x Mercedes x Porsche
The current German vice champion has been quite active in all things Web3. They've created a dedicated platform for digital collectibles within their digital ecosystem. On that site they've since done a variety of campaigns. Now they've added another one.
In cooperation with their partners and minority stakeholders Mercedes and Porsche they've created a special Vfb crest for the stadium's business center. The special thing about it? The crest has been divided into 1893 "Wunschkapseln". For 49,99€ fans can buy one of those and get a digital certificate of it and other benefits. Proceeds are donated either to the club's Foundation projects or to other local causes. Link
🏅 Nike Melbourne Marathon Festival's digital medals
Last Sunday the annual Melbourne Marathon took place. It's part of the weekend-long Melbourne Marathon Festival, which was supported by a crypto partner for the first time this year. The goal of this partnership was to use Coinbase's blockchain tech stack to "redefine and reimagine the way participants and fans experience Australia’s biggest race". In practice this translated into digital medals that all of the 35.000 participants were able to claim after the race and that included some stats of the race in the creative piece and some benefits. Link
Some thoughts on that:
Overall I find it very interesting that there haven't been too many case studies from participation events that arose on my radar. From the concept itself I really like the idea of creating an onchain project that's targeted at participants. The community is huge, it's tightly knit around a common goal and there's a real desire to recognise and immortalise the achievement/moment. Some people even get a tattoo for their first marathon. So in theory, I find this very interesting.
On the other hand, it seems to be difficult to deliver something like that at scale. In the case of Coinbase and Melbourne Marathon runners were sent a personalized link after the race. In order to get the collectible it seems like participants had to go through an onboarding flow to set up their wallet with Coinbase, which could cause some friction. That's why as per 18th of October there were only 837 onchain medals created.
⛵️ Sail GP and NEAR partnership ends
While there are more and more partnerships with crypto exchanges in the world of sports, blockchains themselves seem to get out of deals with leagues and teams but also brands from that ecosystem. Since DraftKing has shut down its Web3-based ReignMakers, it seems to be very likely that their paid partnership with Polygon has ended. Even McLaren Racing's partnership with Tezos has ended last year.
Now there's another one to add: Sail GP x NEAR. The sailing competition and the Layer 1 blockchain have partnered back in 2022. The partnership has been kicked off with some digital collectibles, which were distributed in various ways. They've also launched fan engagement product called "The Dock" which was built on "Web2" tech but also integrated Web3 aspects. Beyond that the league has changed its rules to enable DAOs to own teams and there's actually an organization that is trying to do exactly that. The last one probably won't be affected by the end of the NEAR partnership. However, fans that collected digital assets within "The Dock" now have to take ownership of their connected NEAR account in order to keep them. Link
🥊 Karate Combat Layer 2
Karate Combat has launched one of the most interesting case studies at the intersection of sports and Web3. You can dive into the details of it in Sporting Crypto 's report where they do a deep dive into Karate Combat's Web3 proposition. Link for the report
Building on their success so far, the league has now announced the launch of their own Layer 2 - UP with its own $UP token - which will be built on their partner's Hedera network. What's quite interesting is that they will make their "Up Only Gaming model" tech stack available for free, basically enabling any team or league to leverage that model.
Their Up Only Gaming model builds upon their own token. For teams that want to build a similar proposition, already have a fan token or are building with a blockchain, thus would run into problems either with their partner and their fans, can just wrap their existing assets and create UP-native synthetic versions of it. Link
🎮 A follow up on onchain Gaming
Last week we've talked about a lot of onchain gaming news. That's why I wanted to share some numbers on two onchain games that I ran over on LinkedIn last week:
Off The Grid - the Battle Royale game that wants to enable true ownership of in-game assets with blockchain - has provided some good looking numbers so far (Link):
We've also already spoken about NFL Rivals in the newsletter. When we're looking at the intersection of onchain gaming and sports it's one of the most interesting out there. It seems like the game has reached 6 million users, which is a quarter of Madden's user base - a game that has been out there since 1988/1990. Link
a16z State of Crypto Report 2024 - The Read of the Week
The famous VC firm has published a new edition of their State of Crypto Report. The key topics?
Some note on NFTs from the report that described the state of them really good:
"NFT activity appears to have shifted from high-volume secondary markets to low-cost social collecting experiences"