In 2022 many people have already heard about NFTs, hype on some art and unexpectedly expensive sales of some digital artists attracted much attention to the topic. But how NFTs can be used in sports and in tokenization and digitalization processes? We believe in utility NFTs when you don’t just purchase art or just a picture or video, it’s about things that stay behind the asset itself. When we noticed that our partner club Empoli will play a friendly against the national team of Ukraine just in a couple of days we decided to make an NFT collection and executed it to bring a very important utility for all people who will buy those NFTs.
We decided to take 10 photos from this match add some design to them and mint them as NFTs. We promoted it only with media releases in important Ukrainian sports media and on the social media channels of Empoli, the Ukrainian Association of Football (UAF), and Blocksport. The main idea was to raise awareness of the problem of war in Ukraine and to raise funds for the Ukrainian international charity foundation UNITED 24 backed by the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky.
The starting price of each NFT was around 30$ in BNB and we started auctions just a day after the match not to lose momentum around the event. In a couple of hours first bids were placed and we saw that we attracted some attention as there was a demand for pictures, we also partnered with UNITED 24 so they put some social media posts about our collection. On the next day, every NFT had a bid, so we understood that it is going to be sold out here. All NFTs were sold in a week and we transferred all funds to to the UNITED 24 wallet for the medical needs of the Ukrainian people.
We launched a small campaign without paid advertising and spent resources only on producing and minting NFTs and promotion across the media as it was a charity collection and the results speak for themselves, in fact, we raised a small sum of money to help people out of nothing. Just trying to do the right things – the most important thing is we grab momentum and gave a real utility for buying those NFTs. That’s what we always tell about the NFTs in sports – provide the utility and make your collection special, give it a story and a project will be successful. We are sure every sports brand has a lot of stories to tell and what to provide to their fans both digitally and physically, that’s why NFT can make a good addition to digitalization and tokenization in sports.
