Sorare Knows How to Score
Scott Gralnick is the Director of Global Partnerships at ShapeShift. He also focuses on growing Portis by ShapeShift, the easy to use, non-custodial, embedded blockchain wallet.
Scott: Hi Brian, Thanks for taking the time for this Q&A. Before we get started, can you please tell everyone who you are and how you got into the space?
Brian: Hi Scott, thanks for the invitation. I’m Brian O’Hagan, Growth Lead at Sorare. I’ve been involved in the blockchain space for over three years now. I got involved in this space through a deep interest in monetary thought and policy after completing a Masters in Economics. After reading about Wences Casares from Xapo, Bitcoin finally clicked for me. He convinced me that Bitcoin is the most important social experiment of our time and it blew my mind away. This new global currency is here to stay. However, I’ve always found it hard to explain Ethereum, even through the lens of DeFi (Decentralized Finance). Currently, DeFi seems to be mostly reaching the few over-collateralized people in the crypto space. On the other hand, Sorare, by building a fantasy football game, is creating an experience where ordinary people can use Ethereum to discover the idea of digital scarcity and ownership while having fun and earning rewards.
Scott: Before using Portis, what was the user login flow like, and now that you have Portis integrated, how has that helped your user experience?
Brian: We’re using Portis so our users can interact with the Ethereum blockchain to buy, sell, or trade cards on Sorare. Beforehand, we had a lot of challenges because already existing crypto users were using different wallet options, and new users were using either mobile or desktop wallets.
We decided to implement Portis so that users could benefit from a great wallet experience both on mobile and desktop. Most importantly, we loved their approach to creating a wallet with an email address and a password.
Most of our users are non-crypto users and we thought Portis was the easiest wallet to start with on Sorare.
Scott: Speaking of UX, can you elaborate on your design choice? You’re semi-centralized and semi-decentralized. What made you choose that route when building Sorare?
Brian: When the Sorare founders first discussed building a decentralized application, their shared goal was to build a mainstream product. We knew that the mass market does not care about ideologies; it cares about better products.
That’s why we started building a game based on the most popular sport in the world: football ⚽ (soccer for our US readers). Sorare offers digital collectibles that have both utility and value. These NFTs represent different football players, each of them fun and rewarding in their own unique way.
Most importantly, it’s a game that doesn’t require a lot of crypto knowledge. To do this, we’re decided to create an in-game experience where blockchain technology was used only for the most important thing: making sure that our in-game assets (the Sorare cards) were decentralized. The game’s inner workings are divided into two pieces:
- All the Ethereum interactions within the game are limited to the cards being transferred, sold, bought, and/or exchanged.
- All the rest of the gameplay is centralized, like composing your team for the fantasy football game, live rankings during weekends, etc.
The consequence of this choice is that people need to map their Portis wallet to Sorare. Then we create a semi-custodial wallet for them on Sorare. This helps us subsidize all our users’ gas costs that arise from interacting with Ethereum on our platform.
Scott: How do NFTs (non-fungible tokens which digitally represent collectibles) play into the whole picture? That, to me, is the most important aspect of your game. People can actually earn and make money and take true ownership of your player cards. Can you speak to that a bit?
Brian: If you wish to experience the play-to-earn experience of Sorare, you will have to invest some time and a bit of ETH. You will also need to have some skills to build the right football tactics or scout the right players early on. The NFTs are the Sorare cards. Since these cards are both collectibles and in-game utilities, their prices are derived from both aspects of the game.
The value of any collectible item, virtual or physical, is largely driven by scarcity. The scarcity (or lack thereof) of a crypto collectible is known by inspecting the NFT contract. In Sorare, cards have different scarcity, impacting the valuation of the card.
Here is how the in-game items (i.e. Sorare cards) are auctioned throughout the season:
- 100 rare cards with a starting price of 0.01 ETH
- 10 super rare cards with a starting price of 0.1 ETH
- 1 unique card with a starting price of 1 ETH
The rarer the cards, the higher your player scores, the better your team score becomes. The real ownership of the cards comes from the fact that you can do whatever you want with them, thanks to Ethereum.
Here are the different strategies people use when playing Sorare:
1. Collectors: Criteria such as the popularity of the player in real life, team, nationality, age, specific serial numbers, or special editions are all factors driving value for this group. Collectors are willing to buy and hold certain cards, since they are speculating those will be worth more in the future. Think of buying Maradona before he started playing in Europe.
2. Traders: The objective is simple — buy cheap and resell at a higher price with a focus on the short-term. Players are bought and re-listed often based on the player’s real-life form and/or favorable upcoming matches; they act like market makers/liquidity providers for the secondary market.
3. Gamers: Gamers are primarily motivated by assembling the most competitive tournament team(s). There is a financial rationale for this strategy, as in-game rewards can be targeted to provide an immediate return on investment. Each week, Sorare distributes more than 20 ETH of rewards plus new Sorare cards that you could resell on the secondary market.
Scott: What are you most excited about in the coming weeks to months with Sorare now that you have Portis integrated?
Brian: We have many important top European and American soccer clubs that will be announced on Sorare (you can find all the partnering clubs here) and we are excited to have them. Thanks to Portis, we have the easiest Ethereum on-ramp for future users so that they can interact with Sorare cards seamlessly.
Our vision is to bring crypto into the hands of mainstream users. Imagine a product that covers the issues of censorship resistance, digital scarcity, openness, global liquidity, etc. without you — and this is the most important bit — needing to mention these words. We’re trying to build the product that tells the crypto story for you, through football.
Portis is excited to support Sorare, a thrilling application which highlights the benefits of digital asset ownership on Ethereum. The NFT space is booming! Stay tuned for an upcoming post, where we will show how even Portis users that don’t have any crypto can easily complete transactions on Dapps with nothing more than a credit card, including buying NFTs of their favorite football players.
The Portis Team
Have any questions? Join the conversation on our Telegram and Twitter. Ready to #BUIDL? Head on to our docs.
