By Danis Roberts -
I am very bullish on NFT and Web3 and I believe it is not a fad, but a huge opportunity for sports organisations to explore in 2022 and beyond.
While I have purchased a number of NFTs as a user over the last year I wanted to create and mint my own to better understand the experience from the creator's end.
My NFT was very simple in design and it was minted on the Polygon blockchain using the ERC-1155 token standard, but even that provided some pretty clear learnings:
- Minting is incredibly easy
If you are already set up on OpenSea and MetaMask it takes less than two minutes to mint an NFT. This goes a long way to explaining the amount of derivative art and/or scams on the platform.
- There has never been a better opportunity for creators
Between the ease, the secondary market royalties, and the support within the community - it is an opportunity never before seen for content creators. And this is fundamentally what #web3 is about.
This is also not limited to just art but any field you are interested in from music and film, to sport and business and so on.
- It needs to offer community or utility - ideally both
It is not the art that will that will make the #NFT succeed in 2022 but the communities they help build or the real life utility they offer. It is a cliche now but community & utility drive this space.
This will be the year that the NFT becomes your ticket to unlock a new type of digital membership.
- OpenSea is a platform that understands its users
..but does a proper decentralised competitor (like #LooksRare) need to emerge soon to maintain the web3 spirit?
It does seem a fundamental issue with the decentralised ethos that the likes of OpenSea, Coinbase, Discord etc are more in line with the Web 2.0 business model.
- Gas Fees may stop the car before it even gets running
Outside of onboarding complexity (which is solvable) gas fees must be the biggest turn off.
It will be hard to get new users into the ecosystem with this “hidden cost” which also forces the purchase floor to be so high across the board.
If you would like to chat more get in touch reach out to me on Linkedin or at underscoresport.com
Danis Roberts is a digital and content specialist with experience in multiple sports. He's the founder of Underscore Sport and a FIFA Master alumnus.