Dubai– The Nomo Fantasy Football League, an NFT-based American football fantasy league created by LeagueDAO, has today launched on Polygon, an Ethereum scaling platform onboarding millions to Web3. The new league looks to capitalize on the multi-billion dollar fantasy sports market and usher in a new form of fan engagement — empowering users to own players in their team and compete for rewards based on real-world performance.
The Nomo League is based on teams comprising a myriad of National Football League (NFL) players, including Aaron Donald of the Los Angeles Rams and Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs. At the beginning of each new Nomo Fantasy League, new Player Tokens are minted and managers “draft” teams by purchasing those NFTs. The first Player Token drop takes place on November 16, 2021. New collections of Player Tokens will be released to the community when each new sports league is added or when new players are added to existing leagues (e.g., rookies and free agents).
Staking Player Tokens allows managers to earn rewards each week. Rewards are a direct result of the performance of the real-world players represented by their Player Tokens.
The Nomo Fantasy Football League is the second fantasy football offering from LeagueDAO, a decentralized open-source project building tokenized fantasy sports. LeagueDAO combines DeFi, play-to-earn gaming, and digital collectibles to revolutionize fantasy sports through NFTs, and the ERC-20 token known as LeagueDAO governance tokens (“$LEAG”).
Jake Craven, LeagueDAO, said: “When you apply tokenization to fantasy sports, you open up a world of exciting opportunities to enhance the experience and value for team managers. Tokenized Fantasy Sports allows leagues to truly reward players for their effort, skill, and time spent in a game. LeagueDAO’s mission is to explore a number of different tokenized fantasy sports offerings through the input and guidance of the community.”
The $22b global fantasy sports market is expected to grow by more than 72% to an estimated $38B in the next four years. These figures are hardly surprising given the 60 million fantasy sports players in the United States and Canada alone — each looking for opportunities to follow, engage, and earn money from their fantasy teams.
However, legacy fantasy sports have several key limitations. Web 2.0 leagues and platforms limit a manager’s ownership and control over teams. Building a fantasy sports team takes time, intelligence, and skill, despite which managers never actually own their teams.
Tokenized fantasy sports, meanwhile, allow users to truly own the players that make up their team and earn a share of a rewards pool based on team performance. By developing play-to-earn mechanisms, tokenized fantasy sports allow managers to create value for themselves through their strategy, and team management.
The secondary market for fantasy sport-tied NFT is indicative of the sector’s burgeoning appeal. For example, NBA Top Shot, a popular basketball-based fantasy sports NFT project, has generated over $775M across 11 million transactions to date.
Nevertheless, operating the league places considerable technical demands on the underlying network. Each player token has to be updated with new stats for their respective player. The Nomo League Smart Contract then has to allocate a portion of the reward pool to each user based on how their Player Tokens performed that week. As a result, LeagueDAO is deploying Nomo on Polygon and utilizing the benefits of L2 technology from day one.
Shreyansh Singh, CEO of Polygon Studios at Polygon Studios, said: “LeagueDAO has chosen to launch on Polygon because of the scale of chain processing required for the Nomo league and token minting. The Ethereum layer 1 mainnet is not capable of sustaining such a high level of demand and users would face significant gas fees. Polygon’s layer 2 Ethereum platform provides the scale and speed of processing demanded by LeagueDAO and low-cost Ethereum transactions to attract users and sustain the future of the Nomo league.”
