“*When marketplace operators or any company is abusive to their customers [...] I think there’s opportunity.
So the dream here is: new technology - blockchain - powering a new organizational model - user-owned, user-controlled - eats away at the central rent seekers who are disproportionately extracting value.”
Adam Jackson, co-founder of Braintrust - 100m Token Sale*
Key takeaways
DAOs are emerging to empower communities
DAOs everywhere -including in the sports industry
The first step towards giving back value to the fans is empowering them.
There are many initiatives out there trying to build something big with DAOs, perhaps one of the most recent example is the acquisition of a professional basketball team:
https://twitter.com/DeGodsNFT/status/1519672039962935297
A bit before, BuyTheBroncos also made a lot of noise:
https://twitter.com/BuyTheBroncos/status/1495148083545583625?s=20&t=YRPRnAChP_aDJfreMgm1GA
However, all these initiatives were derived from their initial concept and they always bought an existing team. They haven’t took the challenge to start with the community from scratch.
And yet, Web3 initiatives in esport took a different path
- Yet, esport fans seem to be left on the bench of this empowerment wave, which is striking: there is usually a strong correlation between esport / gamers and web3 appetence.
- A few esport teams have tried to “inject” a web3 component into their communities, in an attempt to surf on fanbase value launching NFT collections or tokens to ensure engagement and create FOMO.
- Those solutions have had a flavour of speculation, especially as NFTs come on top of the architecture and are not utility-driven.
- Others like the famous French team Vitality launched in August 2021 their Vitality token which dove from 2.5$ to less than 0.5$ after a partnership with Socios. All these projects are only cash grabs, they have never involved their community in the process and eventually, they launched fan tokens but not social tokens.
Heroez bets on decentralization to solve the fan heist