NFT's expanding universe: Cricket sets the ball rolling for digital gold

Online platform Rario ties up with leagues and cricketers to offer fans a chance to collect and trade curated NFTs

You can’t touch, feel or hold them, but they are as real as they are virtual. From football clubs like Barcelona and Manchester United to leagues like the NBA, licensed digital collectibles have become the latest fan engagement mechanism in sport. And now, cricket has joined in.
 
Launched last month, Rario, India’s first cricket-based digital collectibles marketplace, will offer fans an opportunity to collect and trade curated non-fungible tokens or NFTs (see box). Packaged as cards (for now), the NFTs contain videos, images and GIFs of specific moments with graphic bells and whistles to personalise it. The platform has tied up with the Lanka Premier League (LPL), the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) and some players like Smriti Mandhana, Faf Du Plessis and Zaheer Khan — and hope to announce more partnerships soon.
 
“When we talk about cricket fans, there are about 800 million to a billion in India,” Ankit Wadhwa, co-founder and CEO of Rario, says. “And there are 2.5 billion fans across the world who have not had the opportunity to connect with the sport outside of broadcast and viewership.” While Wadhwa admits that ventures like Dream11 have created a secondary platform for fan engagement outside of the game itself, a lot remains unexplored.
 
Rario launched its first batch of NFTs on Independence Day this year, and the response, Wadhwa says, has been overwhelming. The first set of packs (100 packs priced at $500 each) was sold out in 20 minutes, he claims. “They were our most expensive ones!” Wadhwa laughs. “And it happened even before our marketing took off.”
 
Analog fandom goes digital
 
The trump card metaphor, Wadhwa, a ’90s kid, admits, albeit reluctantly, is the best to go with to explain what sports NFTs really are. Fan engagement with the trump cards was two-fold. The first was in the uniqueness of everyone’s collection. Cards were rare and often obtained through purchasing some other product or service. Different fans traded them on face value. And then of course, there was the battle. Cards, typically, listed player statistics and in the game, the higher value beat the other.
 
While Rario’s NFTs are at the collectible stage, Wadhwa says the platform is listening to its users to learn and build for more. “Potentially we can run a Rario Premier League, where people can bring XI cards each and we can watch the match simulated in front of us.”
 
While the allure of paying and collecting highlights and images available in the public domain might seem incomprehensible to many, Wadhwa dismisses them as unfounded. “Everyone can see the Mona Lisa,” he says. “But not everyone can own it.”
 
The idea is that fans will collect mo­m­ents — on NBA Top Shot, a video of LeBron James’ windmill dunk went for $400,000 in April — on a blockchain that guarantees them authenticity. Wad­hwa contends that the identifiers (the tailored graphics perhaps) themselves will feed into the collection experience. “Collectors will want to, say, own the first of a pack, or a number specific to a player’s number, a specific statistic and regard that as the true value of the NFT.”
 
Old game, new rules
 
The immediate problem one envisions with NFTs, though, is that of intellectual property rights. National cricket boards are notorious for controlling informat­ion (and thus revenue) flow across the world. Most, like the Board of Control for Cricket in India, have tight broadcast partnerships that are almost always di­rected towards serving content via very specific sources (in the case of the BCCI, almost all images and videos of matches held in India go straight to the official website; in 2012 the board banned photo agencies like Getty and Reuters claiming their photos weren’t just for “bona fide editorial purposes” but instead commercial licensing and sale).
 
Also famously, cricket boards are slow to change.
 
Wadhwa insists that it isn’t so, and they are in conversation with every cricket board and league in the world. With access to archives, collectibles will expand to include moments not just in the future, but also from the past. Wadhwa, for example, has a personal preference for the Dhoni six that won India the 2011 World Cup. “It’s iconic,” he says, “and combined with, say, a collectible from the 1983 World Cup, it will be very valuable.”
 
For that though, first boards have to sign on. “Everybody loves to do business,” Wadhwa says. “We are here to create new forms of engagement and allow fans to put their money where their mouth is." Rario, Wadhwa insists, is just the first mover, the creator of a new product that will eventually revolutionise a gentlemanly system. “Some boards have already indicated they will start engaging in the next couple of months. Others are waiting for regulatory clearances and some want to observe the market. But I have confidence they will all soon come in.”

NFT’s expanding universe

NFTs — non-fungible tokens — are essentially limited collectibles rec­or­ded on a blockchain to prove ownership and authenticity. Over the last year, NFTs are having a defining moment. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet was sold as an NFT for $2.9 million. The artist known as Beeple entered the rec­ord books when a JPG file he creat­ed as an NFT sold for $69.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a piece of artwork that exists only digitally. The rock band Kings Of Leon’s eighth album, “When You See Yourself”, became the first maj­or rock album to be released as an NFT. And slowly, from art, to litera­ture, to music, the NFT has perco­la­ted to the one sphere where maxi­m­um mass audiences reside — sport.

In October last year the NBA launched NBA Top Shot, a market­place where fans can buy and sell basketball related NFTs — which can be anything from a still photo, a GIF to the highlight of a dunk with embedded graphics. By August this year, NBA Top Shot had received close to $500 million in sales.