Olympics and NFTs

Since 2020, the Olympic committee was studying to launch a token, in Japan, commemorating the Olympics. This token would be used to raise funds against wars, hunger and poverty around the world. With the pandemic and the uncertainty that there would be spectators, the IOC backed off.However, in June of this year, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) had announced the launch of a series of collectible Olympics-themed NFTs in partnership with nWay, a subsidiary of Animoca Brands, the company responsible for large non-fungible blockchain token projects , like the F1 Delta Time game, licensed by the world's top motorsport category.Between nway's comings and goings with the Coi, with sensitive copyright issues - all countries must agree to launch the NFT - and with Japan and its cryptocurrency laws, the NFT of the Olympics was becoming a distant dream.The idea of ??the ultimate entity of Olympic sport, then, became the record of the history of the Olympics - much easier to do and without any copyright issues. The main obstacle, however, became the commercial brands in uniforms and accessories.The Olympics NFTs, now solved the commercial problems, will be digital versions of the traditional brooches (or "pins") used since the first edition of the Games, in Athens, in 1896.According to Timo Lumme, executive director of marketing at the IOC: “Olympic pins started as a way to identify athletes, judges and managers, but over the past 125 years they have become a tradition of the Olympic Games, where everyone from athletes to event teams , journalists and spectators participate to collect and exchange badges in the Olympic Village and beyond.Being aligned, according to the director, with the Olympic Agenda and the IOC's digital strategy of embracing new digital technologies to promote Olympic values ??and increase direct fan relations.Also, he says, "They can now connect with the excitement of the Games in a whole new way and own a piece of Olympic history."Since these NFTs have already appreciated 29% since June, collectors will be able to obtain Olympic NFTs in three ways: by buying "little packages" with random digital pins on the nWayPlay platform; buying specific brooches, from other collectors, in the secondary market of the platform itself; and playing an online game themed to the 2022 Winter Olympics, which will be held in February in Beijing, China. The game, however, will only be released in the second half of 2021.Nway also said: “We are honored to collaborate with the IOC to bring the collection of Olympic NFT Pins to the nWayPlay market for the first time,” said Taehoon Kim, CEO of nWay. "We use our experience as game developers to incorporate high quality 3D models with animation and visual effects to create truly premium NFTs."In the parallel market, there is already a list of rare brooches, which has been making the search for good profits for Nway and the IOC.The "packets" with the NFTs cost $10 to $500 and include pins from all editions of the Olympics of the modern era. Prices vary according to the rarity of each digital brooch.Also, this income comes to balance the finances of the IOC with the leakage of revenue from local spectators and the uncertainty of having an audience in most sports, in this sense, the launch of digital pins comes as a response to the context of the pandemic, which imposed a series restrictions on attendance at the Tokyo Games, which start two weeks from now, on July 23rd.Without the massive presence of the public and with the obligation of social distance, the traditional exchange of pins in person becomes unfeasible.NFTs — an acronym for non-fungible tokens, are a kind of cryptocurrency with different characteristics from assets like bitcoin and ether, for example, because they are unique and indivisible.They have become popular over the past year as a representation of cartoons, videos and music and have created a multi-million dollar market where consumers seek ownership of unique and exclusive assets. In the case of the Olympics NFTs, even in the case of the existence of several tokens with the same art, each one of them is unique, as it has a different serial number.This trade in NFTs is based on the trade, quite old by the way, of trading cards, comic books and other arts of popular taste whose stickers, such as baseball, well preserved, confer a value of hundreds of thousands of dollars.One more step, on the whole, for the cryptocurrency system to become more and more part of the real world and gain the right credibility to take bigger flights in the world!