Impossible Finance Research Report #8 – Sportium

Hello from the cryptoverse! Everywhere, we are seeing crypto and sports and entertainment get integrated closer and closer. This week, even the famed Staples Center has been rebranded now to be called the Crypto.com Center. With the emergence of NFTs, we think this presents a new level of opportunity where sports fans can further immerse themselves in the sporting world, and at the same time, be rewarded for their fandom passion in the game.

On-chain games have the ability to provide provable scarcity for limited edition sports collectibles. Beyond simply loving the sport, fans can now become involved with the vibrant community and economy that comes with tokenized communities.

With the tokenization of memorable sports moments or trading cards, fans all over the world can have access to their favorite athletes and support their teams — interacting with them in ways that previously were inaccessible for the typical sports fan. As a result, fans can explore new earning potentials by monetizing their knowledge of the sport and their commitments to franchises.

We believe that sports such as soccer (or football as most of the world calls it), with a global viewership will contribute to an extra layer of reinforcement and engagement of ‘power-users’ and fans around the globe. For these participants, it’s no longer just about collecting cards, but rather the shared experiences and the sense of belonging to a fanbase or group fighting for a single cause that makes it so much more special.

To further understand the magnitude of creating experiences and trading cards on chain, Dapper labs, the company behind NBA Top Shots recently raised another $250 million in funding, valuing the company at over $7 billion, signifying the future importance of on-chain sporting plays. Cryptocurrencies have enabled fans to transact on sports NFT platforms with ease and have their proof-of-ownership irrefutably recorded on the blockchain. From an efficiency standpoint, trading on-chain is a lot easier and fans can now truly own the digital sports collectibles in their wallet address but most importantly, it creates an avenue where the possibilities of incorporating other social aspects are substantially larger. For instance, popular platforms like fantasy sports or sports betting are also starting to be enabled through blockchain technology.

Project Overview
Sportium is an officially licensed multi-purpose sports NFT platform, that aims to direct value towards its users by offering an all-in-one experience for all things sports related. Sportium NFTs enable users to interact with sports in various ways including collecting, trading and earning on the platform, and ensures that all NFTs provided on Sportium’s platform are officially endorsed. Starting with their exclusive Korean partnerships with the K-League (Korean Football League), KPBPA (Korea Professional Baseball Players Association), KPBAA (Korea Pro Baseball Players Alumni Association) and the KBL (Korean Basketball League), Sportium aims to build an official sporting platform. As Sportium gradually expands their reach and global footprint within the sporting world, the platform will also continuously add new partnerships and IPs to its ecosystem. The official partnerships and endorsements are a key differentiator as it allows owners to maintain intellectual property rights all the while preserving its long-term value.

Sportium users are able to collect, trade and earn using ELVN, the first application introduced on the Sportium ecosystem. ELVN is an NFT collectibles platform and marketplace that allows users to trade their officially endorsed Sportium NFTs with other users. Purchasing and collecting Sportium NFTs allow collectors and users to have the added benefit of earning Collector Score. Collector Score can be obtained by users for each card they own, and will vary depending on the rarity and grade (Common, Special, Rare, Legendary, Ultimate) of the card owned. Additional Collector Scores are also available for users who complete special conditions such as collecting a complete set of cards. Having a higher Collector Score provides users with the benefit of being able to open better card packs.

Sportium aims to add further utility to users not just by increasing the number of partnerships and IP rights, but by increasing the number of dApps within the Sportium ecosystem. The platform aims to become a one-stop sports shop and ecosystem by implementing applications from sports broadcasting, community engagement to sports betting.

Project Highlights

• Strong untapped market potential, planned pipeline to capture and scale the platform
• Collaboration with officially licensed sporting partners

Quick Metrics

• Public Sale Token Price: 1 SPRT = 0.03 BUSD
• Total Supply:
• Launchpad Public Sale: ~324,000 USD (split into multiple pools)
  - Standard pool: 150,000 USD
  - Unlimited pool: 150,000 USD
  - Whitelist Allocation: 24,000 USD

Investment Thesis
The Sportium IDO reflects Impossible’s focus and confidence in the NFT x Sports space, especially due to the following.

Untapped market
The market for Licensed Sports Merchandise was estimated at $34.4 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow to $50 billion by 2027. The Global Sports Trading Market was valued at $13.8 billion in 2019. A lot of this is largely untapped within the crypto space, therefore as Sportium begins to expand on their IPs and partnerships, we can expect them to leverage their first mover advantage, capturing a strong portion of the market and as a result, contribute to the growth of the sports market. This works both ways, as for the K-League or any of Sportiums other IPs, as more platforms will create more eyeballs around the league, bringing in more foreign viewership of the IPs on Sportium.

Now add the fact that Sportium accommodates sports betting as well, suddenly their addressable market drastically increases as betting dwarfs both these markets with a global revenue of $203 billion in 2020 according to Statista. As Sportium is able to house all these different products, especially within an environment such as crypto, there is a strong case here that allows them to cater to a much larger audience. An audience that may be familiar with all these different aspects separately but combined, creates a product that can bring in all these passionate members to converge on a single platform, capturing a substantial market share.

Ability to secure exclusive partnership and IPs
Starting with the Korean market such as the K-League should be seen as a stepping stone rather than a limitation when capturing market share because it allows Sportiums to build a reputation as one of the better teams to be able to manage IPs at such a scale, and really hone their skills before entering a market which is more catered to a worldwide audience. That being said, the K-League, to many may seem as an unfamiliar league, has steadily increased its online and in-game viewership through the implementation of K LEAGUE TV, increasing accessibility to both local and international fans. This is exactly the reason why Sportium can be a powerful force within this space as the continuous introduction and implementation of improved viewership infrastructure will undoubtedly attract higher amounts of viewership and popularity for Korea’s first flight football division, increasing the demand for officially endorsed collectibles. This allows Sportium to position themselves strategically to capture this increase in demand, as such enabling a flywheel of sorts where both Sportium and the K League can benefit from each other.

In addition, as Sportium begins to attract more IPs and exclusive partnerships, they will be able to create a moat around their brand. For example, as Sportium moves into different countries in the future, securing new IPs in different leagues, it creates the ability for them to create more exclusive NFTs dedicated to certain leagues. Therefore, massively enabling them to monopolise the ability to leverage naming rights and moments created, on digital collectibles such as NFTs. This can already be seen within the sports gaming industry with the likes of EA and FIFA, where they have exclusive naming rights to teams.

Multi Sport Platform
As we’ve established above, sports is a major part of many people’s lives, it brings people together, provides a sense of competition, and creates an indescribable thrill — win or lose. With Sportium, their focus is to recreate these feelings, providing a one-stop shop for fans of various sports. Initially, Sportium will start off with the Korean Leagues, namely their K-League but will eventually span out to other leagues such as KBL, KBAA, and KOVO, which are their basketball, baseball and volleyball league.

This should give fans a nice variety to pick from, enabling the user to amass a collection of NFTs all in one place. But these aren’t only just for aesthetics or vanity, Sportium wants to create an ecosystem where the NFTs are not only collectible but utilise them in ways where NFTs can mean so much more. For example, by putting three cards up for trade, you stand a chance to gain a card of higher rarity, which is very similar to trade up contracts you see in CS:GO. Furthermore, Sportium will also have a P2E aspect where players can utilise their cards, by participating in the creation of a Fantasy Football team, but with the added utility of being able to auction, trade and lend cards if it’s sat idle in your wallet. Creating a much more capital efficient and accessible way for players to play the game, as not everybody can afford to spend large sums on opening packs.

Finally the last two aspects of the platform are betting and live coverage of games. These typically go hand-in-hand as it adds an extra element of excitement to the game, creating a higher stakes environment. By creating a one-stop shop, Sportium is positioned to cater to a fans of different wants, whether it’s through betting on a match or monitoring your fantasy team whilst games are being played, or just opening packs. It creates an environment where fans from different walks of life can interact with the platform. As such, making it an extremely attractive place to converge and share the love of sports, which at the end of the day, is what we’re here for.

Team
The Sportium is a crossover project between Blueberry NFT and Alphaworks. Blueberry NFT manages the platform’s partnerships and business development while Alphaworks is the core builder for the underlying technology and infrastructure of the Sportium platform.

Together, both divisions have decades worth of experience in building and shipping successful products. Their ability to create products of high quality is second nature, and Sportium is no different. As the team has the same passion for sports as many of us do, understanding the pain points that other platforms face due to the lack of interactivity, which is why Impossible has no doubt that in the future Sportium will be one of the better platforms for all things sports.

Risk Evaluation
Currently, Sportium is predominantly focused in the Korean market. Although sports is extremely popular in Korea, we believe that the lack of international exposure could be a short term hindrance to Sportium. However, with the promising pipeline and partnerships to expand their IP and onboard additional certified sporting associations, we believe Sportium is due to expand to an international scale in the future. Another concern would be betting licenses, especially once expansion occurs into different countries, they may encounter push back on having betting available in countries that don’t typically allow practices such as this.

Sportium Token Metrics:

• Token Name: Sportium (SPRT)
• Total Token Supply: 1,000,000,000 SPRT
• Public Sale Token Price: 1 SPRT = 0.03 BUSD
• Tokens Allocated to Impossible Launchpad: 10,000,000 SPRT (1% of Total Token Supply)
• Launchpad Public Sale: ~324,000 USD (split into multiple pools)
  - Standard pool: 150,000 USD
  - Unlimited pool: 150,000 USD
  - Whitelist Allocation: 24,000 USD
• Day 1 Circulating Market Cap: 10,000,000

Read more about Sportium’s Philosophy on their Litepaper

About Sportium
Sportium is an officially licensed multi-sports NFT platform. Sportium NFTs enable users to interact with sports in various ways including collecting, trading and earning on the platform.

ELVN is the first application on Sportium ecosystem which is an NFT collectibles platform officially endorsed by K-league. Users can accumulate collection points by purchasing their favorite moment NFTs. Users can also trade their moment NFTs on ELVN marketplace.
Website | Medium | Twitter | Telegram | Discord

About Impossible Finance
Impossible Finance is a multi-chain incubator, launchpad, and swap platform led by Ex-Binance & DeFi veterans. It offers a robust product-first ecosystem that supports top-tier blockchain projects to targeted user audiences. With extensive support from key leaders in the crypto industry, Impossible Finance simplifies DeFi for users to enjoy fairer investing, cheaper trading and better yields.
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