[Interview]6 professional baseball Pacific League teams, Mercari, and NFT business to start this year.The foundation is FLOW | New economy

Pacific League 6 teams enter the NFT business

It was revealed on December 16 that the six professional baseball Pacific League teams and Pacific League Marketing and Mercari will collaborate in the NFT business.

The company will provide a service “Pacific League Exciting Moments β” that can collect famous scenes and memorial scenes of the Pacific League 6 teams by the end of the year.

In this service, first of all, it will provide the function of only selling data. In the future, the company plans to consider providing services that utilize blockchain and resale functions for collections.

In other words, the data initially sold is not strictly NFT, but digital data, but it seems that it will be mint to blockchain and converted to NFT in the future to support secondary distribution.

Data sales in the initial service will be supported by credit card payment in Japanese yen, and it is planned to support crypto asset payment in the future. The minimum purchase price is 2000 yen, and those prices will fluctuate depending on the rarity of NFT.

It has been announced that this is the first time that a sports league has entered the NFT business using match video.

As an initial lineup, a total of 18 plays will be recorded, centering on players who were particularly active in the 2021 season. The team name, player name, and number of sales are as follows.

・ Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters
Pitcher Naoyuki Uwasawa, Pitcher Hiromi Itoh, Kensuke Kondoh

・ Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles
Takahiro Norimoto, Takahisa Hayakawa, Hiroaki Shimauchi

・ Saitama Seibu Lions
Kaima Taira, Tomoya Mori, Takumi Kuriyama

・ Chiba Lotte Marines
Pitcher Naoya Masuda, Pitcher Kazuya Kojima, Takashi Ogino

・ Orix Buffaloes
Pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Masataka Yoshida, Yutaro Sugimoto

・ Fukuoka Softbank Hawks
Kodai Senga, Yuki Yanagita, Ryoya Kurihara

Although the official video of a normal game is prohibited from being downloaded, the content purchased by the user through this service can be downloaded and owned by the user, or shared on SNS etc. only when the in-service function is used. It is also possible to do it.

In the future blockchain support, FLOW developed by Dapper Labs will be adopted. It seems that it will take the form of generating NFT metadata at the time of initial sales and deploying it on-chain at the time of response.

As for the sales revenue of the data, since it is a product that uses the portrait rights of the players, it is said that it will be distributed to the individual players.

Interview with Mercari, Mercari, Pacific League Marketing

The editorial department of “New Economy” interviewed Mr. Shingo Fushimi, Executive Officer of Mercari Co., Ltd., Director of Melcoin Co., Ltd., and Mr. Yuki Negishi, CEO of Pacific League Marketing Corp.

– What is the business reason why crypto assets are included in one of Mercari’s three pillars (things, money, crypto assets)?

Originally, Melpay wanted to establish the concept of “increasing wallets.” We believe that cryptocurrency assets will grow as a market in the future, so we have added them to the three pillars.

– Are you considering distribution to external marketplaces in the future?

We are also considering the possibility of linking with other marketplaces such as OpenSea and Rarible.

– Will Pacific League fans benefit financially from entering the NFT market?

There are no financial benefits in the early stages. First of all, I hope you enjoy it as a collection item. If a secondary market emerges, I think there is a possibility.

– What are your thoughts on the sports fan token business in addition to the NFT business in the future?

We are currently in the process of collecting information on fan tokens for consideration.