Crypto Collectables are Coming to Major League Baseball
The cryptocurrency industry has become a big part of any number of industries over the past few years. In a recent report exclusive to Yahoo Finance by Daniel Roberts , cryptos are coming to Major League Baseball in the form of digital collectables in conjunction with the Ethereum blockchain.
According to this report, Lucid Sight is a blockchain gaming company and it has obtained a licensing deal with MLB to launch MLB Crypto Baseball later this summer. Baseball betting fans unfamiliar with the world of cryptocurrency might question the relevance of this deal in relation to their favorite MLB team. However, the crux of the matter involves the ability to collect and trade one-of-a-kind items that cannot be reproduced or stolen.
When Will Crypto Collectables Come to Major League Baseball?
Mr. Roberts described Ethereum as “a decentralized platform for ‘smart contracts’ which are automated agreements for an exchange of value. It runs on a blockchain, the same peer-to-peer, immutable, public ledger that bitcoin runs on.” He goes on to add, the cryptocurrency of Ethereum is ether. So ether is to Ethereum as Bitcoin is to the bitcoin Blockchain.”
Ethereum was first established in 2015 and over the past three years it has become best known for its usefulness for smart contracts. This has led to the development of blockchain games that produce a digital item that is deemed to be collectible since it is verified and tamper-proof.
One of the most popular examples of these digital collector pieces is CryptoKitties. This game allows users to buy and trade digital kitties through the use of ether as a cryptocurrency for payment. The game was launched last November and according to this report users have spent upwards of $25 million in ether on CryptoKitties. One of the pictures in the Yahoo Finance report replicated MLB players as a crypto collectable in animated form. This was part of a MLB Crypto Baseball promotional image released by Lucid Sight.
Can You Bet On Major League Baseball Crypto Collectables?
Kenny Gersh is MLB’s executive vice president of gaming and new business ventures. He mentions that MLB has been looking for ways to take advantage of the expanding reach of cryptocurrencies for the past few years. Other ideas were rejected until the league came upon Lucid Sight as an attractive opportunity to join the mix.
In a direct quote in cited in this report, Gersh commented , “We talked a long time ago about bitcoin and whether we should accept it as payment for MLB.tv and some of our other products, and we opted not to. At the end of the day, we decided that isn’t our business. We’re not in the speculation business. We’re in the business of delivering a baseball to fans. So this game is a more interesting intersection of blockchain technology and what we want to do.”
The starting point for this new game was actually CryptoKitties. Gersh added that, “We were already talking to Lucid Sight around the time that CryptoKitties first came out…and then CryptoKitties sort of validated it a little bit more.”
This could just be the start of an expanding relationship between cryptos and professional sports with other deals already in the works.
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