A non-fungible token basketball game announced a funding round Tuesday led by several well known investors and several NBA teams.
What Happened: Swoops announced a funding round of $3.5 million. The funding round was led by Courtside Ventures and Alpaca VC. Other investors include Gary Vaynerchuk (aka Gary Vee), Slow Ventures, Red Beard Ventures, Future Perfect, Jon Oringer’s Pareto Holdings and DraftKings Inc (NASDAQ: DKNG) CEO and co-founder Jason Robins.
The list of investors also includes the owners of the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers.
Swoops allows users the ability to own, draft, train and stake their players. The players can win cash prizes for owners. The players will be represented with NFTs that have off-chain and on-chain attributes including height, age, position, basketball IQ, shooting, agility and speed.
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Why It’s Important: The funds from investors will be used to build the community, the team and “fast-track the development of the game.”
Swoops is seeking to offer ownership of sports assets for fans, as team ownership is typically only a dream for most fans.
“Basketball is the fastest growing major sport and Swoops is looking to change the game through NFT technology, and its applications. We plan to turn the core assets in sports – the players – into assets that fans can own, trade and stake on,” Swoops co-founder and CEO Manish Sinha said.
Sports fans will be able to influence the outcome of a game with Swoops, Sinha said.
Users will act as owner, general manager, coach and player as part of the game. Users can manage a starting five and compete in contests for cash prizes.
Swoops is similar to a daily fantasy game, but built for Web3 with NFT elements using the Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) and Polygon (CRYPTO: MATIC) blockchains.
“NFT technology unlocks a new, compelling value proposition for the end user. It also unlocks a new business model for the company itself,” Alpaca VC General Partner David Goldberg said.
What's Next: The NFTs will be released in the coming months, with the game set for a summer 2022 release date.
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