To the outsider, the world of NFTs probably seems about as
niche as you can get, with anonymous blockchain users buying and trading cats, apes and Axies,
and whatever else some kid is imagining up right now in their basement…
But that would overlook one thing that’s been a gamechanger for the sector more
than perhaps anything else: Sports.
I’m Forkast’s Joel Flynn - And THIS is Moments in NFT History.
Today we’re going inside baseball, Major League Baseball to be precise,
to talk about MLB Champions - one of the original
decentralised NFT apps - or Dapps - vying for supremacy on the Ethereum blockchain.
So let’s start with the when, which is August 2018, and the who,
which is an LA company called Lucid Sight. Those guys had been making mobile games since
2015, but were about to team up with one of the biggest sports franchises in the world, the MLB.
Kenny Gersh, MLB’s executive VP of gaming and new business ventures, told Yahoo Finance in
July that year that MLB had been looking for a way to get into the crypto world for some time.
Others had been largely trading cryptocurrencies. But instead of accepting Bitcoin, Gersh
settled on the idea of creating collectibles with Lucid Sight.
We’re not in the speculation business,” he said “we’re in the business of delivering
baseball to fans. So this game is a more interesting intersection
of blockchain technology and what we do.” MLB had been worried about people coming to
ball games, and were looking at ways of boosting the involvement of fans, especially young ones.
As Forbes pointed out in October 2018, attendances that year were below 70 million
for the first time in a decade and a half. Officially the league blamed the “cold
weather” for the substantial drop in numbers But it was this original move behind the
scenes to mint MLB NFTs that bosses were betting would boost baseball’s popularity.
What MLB probably didn’t know was that they and Lucid were about to
create a groundbreaking new product. It started with just 40,000 NFTs that
were actually given out for free - AS PHYSICAL COPIES - by the LA Dodgers.
Not everyone claimed them, or even the Ethereum wallets they were tied to - likely, at least in
part, because it was pretty complicated to do so. But, in a reflection of the true beauty of the
blockchain, all 40k still exist and are very much prized possessions among the community.
Regardless, late 2018 marks the start of MLB Crypto Baseball was born
(don’t worry, they’ll quickly change the name). With it, MLB became the first big brand AND
the first sports franchise to license an NFT. By all accounts, these things were pretty
cool - digital bobblehead figurines created that can be looked at in AR and VR
and that existed on Ethereum. They’d also earn their owners potential
rewards based on the performance of their real-life counterparts.
A sort of baseball fantasy league NFT. Now, fixed price listings of these NFTs were
available from the start, but in addition, Lucid was also dropping new, rarer versions of players,
driving engagement as buyers competed to get in at the start of these rare reverse auctions.
It was, according to amateur Youtuber Ben Hex, addictive.
So much so in fact, that the MLBC community spawned CryptoSlam,
one of the best known aggregators for NFT data. Now - full disclosure - CryptoSlam are sponsoring
this series, so let’s get that out of the way. The point here is that the company’s existence
owes much to the neglect of this hugely original NFT by both Lucid Sight and MLB itself.
Problems had emerged which left the users frustrated - not least
with decisions that some said prioritised making Ethereum
over community engagement,, which had ostensibly been the original goal.
And there were tensions too between MLB and Lucid Sight
They appeared to fall out over the rollout of new features,
among other things, and that ultimately led to the end of new NFTs being minted by early 2020.
So the popularity of MLB Champions dwindled, right until the so-called
NFT Mania during the COVID-19 pandemic. But by then, MLB had officially severed
ties with Lucid, and instead turned to Topps and Candy Digital for future partnerships.
Some reckon the failure of MLBC was the result of Lucid being TOO EARLY to the party.
If they’d held their course through 2020, or even just started the project a year later
than they did, they could have capitalized more comprehensively on the pandemic’s NFT mania.
It is though a testament to the enduring commitment of baseball and NFT fans
that MLB Champions lived on, and continued to be traded in third party marketplaces.
Indeed, it’s the longevity of these remarkable NFTs is, in the words of Cryptowisser,
an encouraging notion for the industry’s future. But it is also perhaps an indication that for many
it’s passion, not profit, that’s at the heart of this blockchain revolution.