What is Sorare: NFT based fantasy football
Launched in 2019, Sorare is a fantasy football game where players can buy, sell, trade and manage a virtual team of player cards represented as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). At the moment, the cheapest Sorare player card is trading at 0.005 ETH, while the most expensive player card is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
What is Sore?
Sorare is a football-based NFT platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. Sorare users (referred to as “managers”) buy, sell and exchange player cards represented as NFTs using the ERC-721 token standard.
How to get a Sorare card?
The game divides player cards into tiers based on rarity – Common, Rare, Super Rare, and Unique. Each card represents a real player such as Cristiano Ronaldo or David Beckham. Each season, 100 rare cards, ten super rare cards, and one unique card are released. Rare, Super Rare, and Unique cards can be bought, sold, and traded in Sorare. However, regular cards do not exist as NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain and cannot be leveled up, sold or traded.
Managers use the cards to create a virtual team of five players, each to be represented by a separate player card:
- One goalkeeper
- One defender
- One midfielder
- One striker
- One additional player who is a defender, midfielder or striker
- Managers can also nominate a team captain from all non-regular cards.
What do Sorare cards do?
Teams on Sorare earn points by participating and winning leagues. Each card shows the player’s score based on the player’s actual performance over the last five games, including statistics such as goals, assists and penalties. To calculate card points, the player’s points are multiplied by card bonuses based on captain status, season, and experience points. Finally, the total score of each team is the sum of the points of the five cards.
How to make money on Sorare?
There are nine leagues in the game, divided into three different league structures: global, regional and special. Each league consists of four divisions and managers can enter one team in each division to participate in weekly leagues and receive ETH and card prizes. Managers can then send ETH rewards to their personal wallets via the Sorare website.
Who is behind Sorare?
Sorare was founded in Paris in September 2018 by French developers Nicolas Julia (co-founder and CEO) and Adrien Montfort (co-founder and CTO). Julia and Montfort were respectively VP of Operations and VP of Engineering at Stratumn, an enterprise-grade blockchain solutions company.
In May 2019, Sorare raised over $500,000 in a seed round of funding led by Seedcamp, Kima Ventures and ConsenSys Ventures. In July 2020, a seed funding round led by e.ventures (now known as Headline) raised about $10 million for Sorare. The company then raised $50 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark in February 2021, with additional funding from Headline, Accel and other angel investors.
Sorare has licensed players from 140 clubs in 31 leagues.
The platform is allowed to use the portraits of Major League Soccer (MLS) players (but not the rights to the image of MLS and its clubs). Also behind the game are such well-known players as André Schurrle and Gerard Piqué.
In March 2021, Sorare partnered with gaming giant Ubisoft to launch a limited-time tournament called the One Shot League, in which managers create teams using players from the Jupiler Pro League.
Sorare price history
As an NFT-based collectible bundle, Sorare is currently ranked 5th in terms of sales of all time. To date, Sorare has over 400,000 completed sales totaling approximately $82 million.
As NFT began to gain momentum in February 2021, the company experienced a historic peak of activity towards the end of the month. Total sales hovered around 1,000 sales per day in January 2021 and rose to 6,000 sales per day by February 27th. In March 2021, Sorare sold the world’s most expensive player card, Cristiano Ronaldo’s unique NFT worth almost $290,000. However, as interest waned, total volume and total sales gradually declined and are currently hovering around $300,000 and 1,300 transactions per day.
What is the future of Sorare?
Like all DApps on the Ethereum blockchain, Sorare struggles with high gas fees and slow transactions when the network is congested. To solve these scalability issues, Sorare will use a layer 2 solution