Since the invention of baseball, the appetite for player memorabilia has grown from a hobby of the die-hard fan to a bonafide investment asset class for serious collectors. Over the last couple of years, the memorabilia business has been rapidly expanding into the metaverse with digital collectibles in the form of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Since 2019, the meteoric growth of the overall NFT market, which is a subset of the crypto ecosystem, soared from almost nothing to more than $44 billion in 2021.
Deloitte Global predicts that NFTs for sports media will generate more than $2 billion in transactions in 2022, about double the figure for 2021 and by the end of 2022 that 4–5 million sports fans globally will have purchased or been gifted an NFT sports collectible.
With that kind of momentum, it’s no wonder that professional sports organizations like the MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL are enthusiastically embracing NFTs as the next generation of collectibles.
Future Stars Series president and CEO Jeremy Booth is known for pushing the game of baseball and its amateur athletes into new territories through innovation. Recognizing the serendipitous timing of the NFT explosion coinciding with the NCAA rule change allowing college athletes and recruits to benefit from their name, image, and likeness (NIL), his team wasted no time creating a groundbreaking platform to provide an entry point for amateur players to build their brands and connect with fans through the creation of digital assets.
