While Major League Baseball was one of the first leagues/teams to really launch NFT's the project fell apart. Lucid Sight, the crypto/blockchain partner of MLB, miss managed the whole rollout so bad that its actually amazing to see. When MLB announced before the season that they terminated the deal with Lucid Sight I was anxious to see if they also teamed up with Dapper Labs the creators of the NBA's Top Shot. This obviously did not occur however I was interested to see what Candy Digital was as I had never even heard of it.
Candy Digital is a brand new company that's first customer is Major League Baseball. Its owners though have deep roots both in the sports world and in the crypto realm. The joint venture, Candy Digital, was formed by the Fanatics Chainman Michael Rubin, Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz, and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk. With Rubin you have immense sports exposure, he did try to buy the Carolina Panthers Football team and Galaxy Digital has been building a heavier and heavier hitter in the crypto world.
While MLB already has baseball cards NFTs thanks to its partnership with Topps it is based on the Wax Blockchain to avoid transaction fees. Candy Digital however will build upon the Ethereum blockchain like so many NFTs are built off of. Candy's ecosystem will include much more than the baseball cards Topps currently offers and what Dapper Labs has built out for Top Shot. Not only are baseball cards going to be available and highlight clips like the two mentioned offer but also different collectibles. This could be really interesting to see as baseball has a crazy memorabilia market so tapping into it even slightly would be a crazy windfall.
A key thing I feel is that they are going to make sure trading can happen and that is really cool and something that any sort of card game or collection type of thing needs to have. The buying and selling of course are important are huge but trading is another key feature. I would assume there will be some type of bobbleheads or figures and I wonder if gameplay is something they are looking at in the future!
