As the business end of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar approaches, Crypto.com has announced that it will create 10,000 football-themed non-fungible tokens in partnership with Coca-Cola.
The NFT drop will see thousands of tokens memorialize the activities of the players themselves: the collection, dubbed Piece of Magic, is made up of NFT artworks “inspired by the unique heatmaps created by each team’s on-field attacks, tackles, and winning goals.”
A New Form of Memorabilia
Hosted on Crypto.com's NFT marketplace, the 10,000 tokens combine digital art and football, with enigmatic NFT artist GMUNK recruited to work on the project.
“A superb talent who has consistently pushed the boundaries of art’s newest and most exciting field, GMUNK’s heatmap-inspired NFTs will capture the passion and determination shown by players during the World Cup,” predicted Nazli Berberoglu, FIFA World Cup General Manager at The Coca-Cola Company.
“It’s a privilege to partner with Coca-Cola and GMUNK to memorialize these historical matches that will forever be captured on the blockchain,” added Steven Kalifowitz, Crypto.com's Chief Marketing Officer. “Together we are creating a completely new form of memorabilia.”
While NFTs that track the heatmaps of players competing in the showpiece event on December 18 are likely to be hot commodities, the most coveted NFTs could be those capturing the movements of this era's top stars, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. At 35 and 37 respectively, the pair may not make it to football's greatest stage in four years' time.
Although NFTs are accessible through Crypto.com's NFT platform, fans must also register on Coca-Cola's Fanzone portal and access the NFT banner there.
Some fans may be mystified as to why the artworks aren't being tokenized on FIFA’s own FIFA+ Collect NFT marketplace, which is powered by Algorand. To date, that platform has welcomed four drops: The Genesis Drop, the FIFA Archives Drop, the Curator Collection (South American Flair) and the FIFA Archives 2 Drop.
At the time of writing, the most expensive NFT on FIFA’s marketplace depicts Kylian Mbappe's 64th minute goal in France’s 4-3 quarterfinal win over Argentina at the 2018 World Cup in Russia: bids on the token start at $5,500.
