National Football League quarterback Patrick Mahomes has signed a deal with Dapper Labs, making him the face of a new NFL video-highlight NFT platform.
Mahomes became the first celebrity to break the awkward silence after celeb-based crypto endorsements fell flat during the recent market downturn.
Heavy-hitters like “The Martian” star Matt Damon, comedian Larry David, basketball player LeBron James, and Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady basked in the aura of last year’s crypto bull run but were conspicuously silent as the market turned south earlier this year. Some infamous advertisements like Damon’s Crypto.com “Fortune Favors the Brave” reel have vanished from American televisions, with only $36,000 spent on adverts in July 2022.
Dapper Labs is hoping Mahomes can usher in a new era of celebrity endorsements.
NFL ALL DAY prepares for a new season
Dapper Labs, a portfolio company of crypto VC firm CoinFund, hopes Kansas City Chiefs’ Mahomes can engage fans with in-product features and events.
Mahomes is excited at the prospect of fans connecting with their favorite players and teams through “NFL ALL DAY,” a new video-highlight platform in the mold of Dapper Labs’ high-profile NBA TopShots collection.
Dapper Labs has secured the backing of former NBA star Michael Jordan and current Brooklyn Nets pro Kevin Durant, regarded by many as one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
As part of the NFL season, set to commence on Sept. 8, 2022, unique, limited edition highlights with authentic videos called “moments” will be offered, with different rarity tiers. In addition to the video footage of performances, each “moment” will contain information about the player and the game involved and will have a unique serial number.
The first drop will take place on Friday, Aug. 18, 2022. “Moments” will also capture the new season’s action and will come in packs, each containing a random collection of moments. The NFTs will be traded on a peer-to-peer marketplace.
Could a sports metaverse be on the horizon?
Tom Brady, a quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, launched an NFT platform called “Autograph” last year that raised $170 million in Series B funding.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a type of digital certificate living on the blockchain, representing ownership of a physical or digital item. They have found a niche in the sports industry to immortalize touchstone moments in an athlete’s career. They often resemble trading cards in the real world and are bought using cryptocurrencies on secondary marketplaces like OpenSea.
For some, NFTs of digital merchandise may have a big part to play in the metaverse, a persistent, interoperable virtual world online whose name hails from a book by Neal Stephenson called Snow Crash.
English Premier League soccer club Manchester City has embarked on a three-year construction of their home ground, the Etihad Stadium, in the metaverse. The partnership with Sony is designed to immerse fans in games from wherever they are and has the potential to rake in millions from the club’s rabid online fanbase.
The club will investigate the possibility of fans meeting players in the metaverse and purchasing products unavailable in the physical world.
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