Pro sports leagues to support NFTs — Dapper Labs

Pro sports leagues may now be open to exploring non fungible tokens, according to Dapper Labs’ head of partnerships.

The NFT sector has seen a massive growth this year, and it’s really no wonder pro sports leagues are jumping on the NFTs moving train.

Pro sports leagues no longer resistant to exploring NFTs — Caty Tedman

While speaking during Yahoo Finance’s All Markets Summit on Monday, Dapper Labs’ head of partnerships, Caty Tedman, said that there has been a sudden shift in the paradigm and previous stance of professional sporting organisations with regards to NFTs, and that’s because of the sector’s booming growth in early 2021.

Tedman claims that lately, there’s been an improvement in understanding the fact that NFTs are really a thing. She then added that conversations around the topic is now dramatically smoother, meeting with little or no resistance at all.

Dapper is known for pioneering officially-licensed sports NFTs when it launched NBA Top Shot towards the end of 2020. Since that time, the firm has gone on to strike numerous partnership deals with other major sporting franchises including the National Football League (NFL), the Spanish football organization La Liga, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), and the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).

Recalling Dapper’s discussions with the NBA prior to launching NBA Top Shot, Tedman says the organization was quite apprehensive at the time. Understandably so however, as NFTs had not yet been proven to work as a means for sports merchandising by then.

Tedman then added that Dapper had just been lucky enough to start with NBA, being that Adrienne O’Keeffe, the organization’s Associate Vice President of Global Partnerships & Media was very receptive to the NFT idea.

Going by the data from CryptoSlam, NBA Top Shot NFTs have generated well over $32 million worth of secondary sales so far in October, already representing a 58% increase from what was made the in the previous month.