The NHL Is Our Final Hope 🙏🏻
The NHL Is Our Final Hope 🙏🏻
Weekly Roundup on sports NFTs, featuring Top Shot Rookies, NHL Plans, the Monaco GP tickets, and big brands launching on FLOW.
Happy long weekend, American friends.
Well, it finally happened.
Sort of.
The project known as “NHL Breakaway” released details about their long-awaited NFT collection. The details came in blog form yesterday afternoon. TL;DR:
And the community was…underwhelmed, to say the least.
The reactions in the breakaway Discord were relatively critical, and this one sums up my feelings (and that of many others) quite well:
However, despite the backlash, all is not lost.
The team has been mum on whether they will adapt to the critics or stay the course - and after all, they still haven’t actually done anything.
It’s early. And we need to give them benefit of the doubt.
And quite frankly - I really hope they somehow nail this.
Because the NHL and their partners at Sweet have an absolutely golden opportunity here: they get to go last.
Every other major North American sports league - NFL, NBA, MLB, etc. - has launched their “collectible” NFTs in the last few years.
All the feedback on these products is out in the open, and readily available for any newcomers to process and lift their program above it.
Imagine a world where the highest minted NHL NFT is #/200, and every challenge that comes down the pipe lights the platform on fire.
It’s not impossible.
And it would be a good way to bring interest (i.e. hype) from both mainstream NHL fans and NFT degens together, and also incredibly healthy for the NHL which is in dire need of something cool on the tech side.
In today’s edition:
Rookie Legos Drop on Top Shot
Monaco GP launches NFT Tickets
Sorare Releases Team Jerseys
Big Brands drop on FLOW
A bunch of Matthew Tkachuk highlights
Here is what’s on tap:
🏟️ FREE Candy MLB Rookie Ball | 30 seconds
Candy has released another NFTs, this time to celebrate the 2023 rookies. Its free and painless to claim!
🥋 FREE $KARATE Tokens | 2 minutes
I just found out recently about Karate Combat, an MMA league with a futuristic vibe and a web3-native element. They are offering 80 tokens to anyone who downloads their app. Georges St-Pierre is a part owners, and Bas Rutten is on the board.
I also asked them for a Promo Code for EXTRA tokens - so once you’re in the app, type in FIRSTMINT under Redeem Code.
🎨 Red Bull Doodle Art | 2 minutes
Red Bull ran a contest for Doodle-based art, and it received 120k submissions. Out of those, 61x were selected, and the Doodle artist (Burnt Toast) will be coloring in ONE of them as the winner. It’s just 5 bucks to grab a random one of the 61 finalists. Note: this ends at 11am PST today!
🧊 Rookie Legos Drop on Top Shot
Man. I wish they wouldn’t do this.
This week, Top Shot dropped their final second last legendary pack of the season, titled “Rookie Revelations”. The packs featured 2022-23 rookies, each minted to #/75 and with a hefty price tag of $499.
INSERT TWEET
Half the packs were also distributed via the “burning leaderboard”, where collectors were encouraged to burn rookie moments from past season to try and make it to the top 350 to earn a RR pack from this drop.
As you would expect, collectors burned like crazy at the last minute and the cut off score was over 20,000 TSS (~$1,000, despite the pack cost of $499).
Of note: Collectors were allowed to burn their “locked” Moments, in what was clearly another attempt from Dapper to move the goal posts. Not very locked if it can be burned, right?
As of this writing, the rookie floors were as follows
🏁 Monaco GP launches NFT Tickets
Pretty self explanatory title!
This weekend’s Monaco GP will come with an NFT ticket companion, minted on Polygon and with a promise of future loyalty benefits. Nice.
This is pretty massive considering F1’s growing popularity - it signals that more and more sports leagues and organizations are testing the crypto waters with a format that’s incredibly passive (tickets).
You can read all about it on Blockworks.
👕 Sorare Releases Team Jerseys
In a long awaited move, Sorare has added Jerseys to their Club Shop.
The Club Shop is basically their own little store where users can buy items with coins they’ve won in-game. They have debuted this feature for the playoffs on the NBA side (but not yet for NBA merch, just Sorare stuff).
The jerseys are now available for the Soccer side, and will be “mystery” jerseys and unrevealed until I’m assuming the purchase.
Sorare made many other updates this week, including a new free entry system in France that’s in accordance with a new gambling law. Read the full update here.
🔥 Big Brands drop on FLOW
Two major “brands” made their debut on FLOW this week.
Fast & Furious branded Hot Wheels NFTs sold out in just 5 minutes last Monday, as the ravenous HW community scooped up 14k packs at $20 a piece.
Star Wars dropped on Cryptoys for $39.99 a pack, featuring Darth Vade, Luke, and Leia - but failed to sell out as of this writing, despite the hype!
What Matthew Tkachuk has been doing these playoffs is absolutely insane.
Oh my god Wemby.
This is from way back last week, but man worth the listen.
Scott Foster got decked by LeBron and this exchanged ensued.
Also - baseball stuff, amiright?
**This is not financial advice. Nothing in this newsletter, podcast, or publication should be considered financial or trading advice of any kind. Please do your own thorough research and make your own trading decisions. This is not advice.”
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