Golden State Warriors first professional franchise to launch NFT collection
The team announced that they’ll be launching an NFT collection. NFT stands for nonfungible token, and it’s been on fire over the last few months. The technology backing it is a huge part of what drives its value.
According to CNBC, people have spent over $230 million buying and selling these tokens that are ultra-rare. To be fair, there are also skeptics as the NFTs are typically moments or items that can be found elsewhere.
The Golden State Warriors have always been looking towards the future, and now they’re doing so when it comes to how fans prefer to digest their highlights.
As for the Warriors NFT, the tokens will be launched on OpenSea platform.
"“NFTs have been around for years, but they’ve really become more mainstream and popular this year. The inflection point for us was really just watching NBA Top Shot start to explode,” Warriors president Brandon Schneider said via ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne."
According to Shelburne, the team is planning to offer digital championship rings and digital ticket stubs for historic games. While this is a relatively new feature, the NFT world has been around for years.
With other ways to collect gaining steam (one of the more common, old-school ways of collecting is trading cards for reference), blockchain has soared into the national spotlight. Another interesting note that Shelburne made is that OpenSea only accepts ether, a cryptocurrency.
Over the last several months, the Warriors have studied NFTs, and in that time, cryptocurrencies have started to soar with Tesla’s Elon Musk and Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban a few of the top backers of dogecoin.
As for the Warriors and their NFTs, they’ll be holding actions, Shelburne added. Another nice aspect is that these proceeds will partially go into their community fund as it’s been a tough year for the Bay Area.
With Joe Lacob and Peter Guber as the majority owners along with people like Chamath Palihapitiya on the executive board, the Warriors are the perfect franchise to bring NFTs for organizations to market.
This trial should be a good gauge for the rest of the teams as Golden State has blossomed into a worldwide name over the past several years.