Major League Baseball, if it ever settles its owners’ strike, plans to wade further into the rapidly growing non-fungible token trend in 2022 and beyond.
And that decision comes with an acknowledgment that NFTs are controversial, with a growing chorus of critics pointing out that the creation of digital collectibles on the blockchain is environmentally harmful and that NFT financial speculation can be financially ruinous.
Baseball has to walk the razor’s edge between fan demand for such products and those criticisms.
“We didn’t want to position these things as investments. I wanted to position them as collectibles,” said Kenny Gersh, MLB’s executive vice president of business development, who manages baseball’s NFT strategy. “We want to create a line of NFT collectibles that fans would want for the intrinsic value of the NFT itself.”
NFTs and related technologies such as blockchain and cryptocurrency have existed for some time in the tech realm. They exploded into wider American culture a year ago with NBA Top Shot digital video highlights packaged as collectibles, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in front-end and secondary market sales, of which the NBA and its players union get a cut. Other sports have seen that and raced to launch their own NFT deals amid the wider ongoing collectibles boom, and in some instances,
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