Sorare: Scarce digital assets powering a football fantasy league
Backing Ethereum’s largest non-fungible token issuer
Fabric Ventures is excited to back the Sorare team in their latest $4M round alongside e.ventures, Partech, Semantic, Seedcamp, Consensys and André Schürrle.
Gamers around the world spent over $100,000,000,000 in 2019 alone.
That is $100 billion in pure expenditure, largely spent on digital assets and collectibles.
That is $100 billion that these gamers will not recover.
With the advent of digital scarcity and digital ownership, we can envision a world where these expenditures become assets. Once digital in-game items become investable assets, entire economies will build up within games. Economies that players can sustain themselves from.
Without stretching too far, one can easily imagine this $100 billion turning into $1 trillion of capital invested into provable scarce digital assets within game economies.
$100 billion in annual expenditures can become trillions of USD in investments in digital assets within game economies.
A user controlled economy for digital collector cards and fantasy leagues is exactly what Sorare has been building … and it has completely taken off over the past months! In December 2019 they saw $30k of volume. Six months later, in June 2020, they shot past $350k in monthly volume with a unique Cristiano Ronaldo card selling for 59 ETH / $13,500 a few weeks ago. They have signed over 70 clubs including Juventus, Atlético Madrid, Olympique Lyonnais and the entire MLS Player Association and keep powering ahead with a comfortable leading position as the largest NFT issuer on Ethereum.
Before we even made our investment, I discovered the game from a player’s perspective and was quickly sucked into their SO5 fantasy league which has single-handedly reignited my interest to follow football games. The user interface built by the Sorare team accomplishes the difficult task of seamlessly allowing players to interact with non-fungible tokens, invest into digital assets and spend ETH. The notions of private keys, gas prices, transaction costs are all abstracted away. But should a user ever want to transfer their assets off the Sorare platform, they are free to do so anytime. This keeps a clean game interface, while guaranteeing players that their assets do not have platform risk and can be integrated into any 3rd party application.
But most importantly, they have created the right incentives for players! Given their cards have value on the secondary market, the bi-weekly SO5 tournaments have rewards with real value. In the past month alone, I have won 3 cards valued above 1.5 ETH each. Some of the top players have made 100–150 ETH in profit over the past year from rewards and value accrual of their star cards. This radically shifts every player’s mentality from expenditure to investment, while keeping the gaming nature intact.
Sorare is democratising the ability to make money as a football scout and manager. Every gamer can now become a football manager.
We are thrilled to back Sorare alongside Christian Miele & Dominic Wilhelm at e.ventures (with whom I initially started diving into blockchain assets in 2015), Partech, Semantic Ventures, Seedcamp, Consensys and André Schürrle. The team at Sorare is building a rocketship at the intersection of gaming and digital assets, and we look forward to what the next 10 years will bring us.
Additional Resources
Sorare’s Website | Twitter | Medium | Discord
If you would like to join this incredible team, Sorare has a few open positions at their office in Paris. Check out openings here.
To learn more about Fabric Ventures, you can visit our website , follow us on Twitter and read our investment thesis.
