The Rise of IPL and Fantasy Sports Owner-Players on the Blockchain
India’s loyal cricket fans are going online to play their favorite sports game as stadiums close due to the coronavirus pandemic. Sports enthusiasts are especially drawn to the challenge of assembling their own cricket A-teams in fantasy sports. With new ways to give users the earnings potential of real-world sports management and ownership by taking home some of the team revenue and merchandise sales like a real-world sports franchise owner, even the best box seats in the stadium may sound boring.
The new ownership model in fantasy sports is made possible by the convergence of two trends. Riding the wave of cricket popularity in India, the Board of Control of Cricket in India (BCCI) created the Indian Premier League (IPL) in 2008, selling eight teams as franchises. In so doing, Indian cricket entered the global market for lucrative cricket sponsorship and merchandising deals. Backed by their strong fan base, the IPL cricket teams have become the richest in the world.
The birth of the blockchain digital ledger for transparently recording peer-to-peer transactions, also in 2008, is allowing cricket fans an opportunity to prosper, too. On the Ethereum blockchain, as fantasy sports gamers play and win rewards through the platform currency, based on the ERC721 token, they share in more of the platform revenue. The hot ticket to the global sports merchandising market is the ERC1155 non-fungible token (NFT) — a unique digital identifier representing an underlying digital asset.
NFTs allow any digital asset to be tokenized. For the first time, fantasy sports users can trade, buy and sell their player cards and other digital assets within and outside of the game. Users can get a piece of the growing sports merchandising pie currently monopolized by the BCCI and IPL cricket team franchise owners.
NFTs and the Global Cricket Merchandising Market
Imagine owning the NFT for the Adidas Adipower Vector Mid cricket shoe when Virat Kohli hits his 6,000 runs. With this much-anticipated goal reached, the NTF-backed shoes unlock a 10 times points multiplier. Or you own the Kohli player trading card for run-scoring. Once he hits that magic number, you could collect your points multiplier and then sell the card at a premium outside the game to the highest bidder.
Fantasy sports is at the frontier of offering new ways for players to make money using NFTs. All of this was made possible when the IPL created sports franchises and a global India cricket sports merchandising market. The big turn in popularity came when India won the World Cricket Cup in 1983. After the big win, many new cricket teams were formed on the Indian subcontinent where the game is popular in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Since its launch, the Indian Premier League has become the most popular sporting event in India.
But the fans were still left on the sidelines as the sports franchises became richer. Fantasy sports changed that by rewarding users for their skill tracking the performance of players and coaches and researching sports statistics to assemble a winning team. As a result of these tasks, 60 percent of fantasy sports users are watching more sports and 87 percent are engaging in more and new types of sports, according to a Federation of Indian Fantasy Sports (FIFS) survey. “Fantasy sports is a powerful fan engagement tool to increase sports consumption,” commented John Loffhagen, Chairman of FIFS.
With a dedicated fan base, India has a thriving fantasy sports game market in cricket with 90 million fantasy sports users.
Rage.Fan uNFTs
Over the last year, sports trading cards have become the most popularly traded NFT. Sports fans can also market digital versions of sports jerseys, shoes, and any other game asset. And because NFTs are programmable, they can have many utilities layered onto them, such as the unlocking of points multipliers.
With NFTs, users can sell their game assets on and off the game platform, potentially reaching the lucrative global sports sponsorship market.
Rage.Fan has uniquely produced uNFTs or digital collectibles. Based on the ERC1155 standards, each sale of a player trading card or other digital asset is immutably recorded on the blockchain digital ledger, providing proof of authenticity and making it difficult to forge cards.
NFTs allow fantasy sports users to get a piece of the lucrative global cricket sponsorship market the IPL has created. The BCCI makes big bucks from IPL sponsorship deals. For the 2019–2020 season, the BCCI generated US$535 million in revenues, of which US$345 million came from the IPL, from sponsorship rights, media rights, and bilateral cricket matches with other global leagues.
The unique aspect of Rage.Fan uNFTs (Utility NFTs) is that they are not only trading cards but also Action Cards. Collectors can buy cards depicting The flagship or trademark actions of the player (Dhoni’s helicopter shot or Virat Kohli runs) and earn rewards multiples in various ways when this action is used in a game.
Owning a Cricket Team — Only a Fantasy
What’s next? Could fantasy sports users get in on lucrative Olympic sponsorships — the most profitable opportunity in sports merchandising? Cricket has only been played in the Olympic games once, the 1900 summer games. Back then, this elitist sport played by the upper classes only attracted two countries to compete, France and Great Britain.
In an interesting twist in which real-life sports imitate fantasy sports, cricket could first make its way into the Olympics as an eSport — a close cousin of fantasy sports in which sports gaming competitions are played as video games for prize money. The Esports Federation of India considers eSports a professional sport and is lobbying for inclusion in the Olympics.
When the stadiums reopen, many more fans will have digital skin in the games. Considering that NFT cards are trading for six figures with one Cristiano NFT selling for $300k, the bigger game payouts are changing the stakes for cricket fans. Fantasy sports users could one day buy virtual cricket franchises in-game, and perhaps even a real IPL franchise with their winnings and NFT sales.
About Rage.Fan
Rage.Fan is a fan-first decentralized fantasy sports platform where players will have the opportunity to acquire action cards based on NFTs to earn additional in-game points. Players will partake in an Augmented Reality based Token hunt platform, Scramble, to collect $RAGE coins. The platform will also host a one-of-kind Sports Oracle offering reliable secure off-chain sports data.
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