By CCN.com: A company called Lucid Sight announced its partnership with Major League Baseball last year. Now the deal is coming to fruition, with the launch of MLB Champions , a crypto collectibles game that allows you to own a digitized version of baseball cards and play with them.
Digital collectibles are perhaps the only way to reach the next generation, Lucid Sight CEO Randy Saaf told Yahoo Finance .
“Digital natives,” or people who will have had some version of the internet and mobile devices throughout their lives, will gravitate instead toward digitized versions of collectibles. The blockchain and non-fungible tokens make it possible to own these assets in a way that previous virtual trading games couldn’t have enabled.
Like real-world collectibles and baseball cards, the virtual players can be sold and traded on the marketplace. New players can be bought during drafts or in packs from the company. Player stats improve through usage. Saaf said:
“Our game is a fantasy-esque type game, where you buy the collectibles, you buy a Bryce Harper or Mike Trout, you play them in the game, and if Mike Trout hits a home run to win the world series, that generates new rewards that can be kept scarce, powered by blockchain.”
Digital collectibles, at least when tied to the blockchain, are arguably superior to traditional ones. They can’t be counterfeited, for example, and the company can’t just issue more of them.
There’s no need for the Pawn Stars guy to call his friend and have him come down and check out your item. It’s either legitimate or not.
Saaf says the company doesn’t repurchase collectibles from people, but the marketplace works independently of the company. He mentions that some of the collectibles sold in 2018 for $5 are now trading for $20. The laws of supply and demand come into effect.
Like the card companies of days past, the official blessing of Major League Baseball plays an important role in the attractiveness of the digital assets. Memorabilia is massive across sports leagues. Digital memorabilia is a new frontier.
Baseball cards were fun to collect if you were a kid growing up in the 90s, but they weren’t as fun as POGs , for example, which had a game associated with them.
Moving into the 2000s, collectible trading card games became all the rage in the form of Magic: The Gathering and Pokemon.
As Saaf points out, kids of the future don’t have much interest in just owning a digitized version of a bobblehead – just as they don’t have much interest in the trinkets themselves. Building on Ethereum enables Lucid Sight to provide all the benefits of owning a rare item with the added benefit of being able to use it.
Unlike collectible trading card games, you don’t risk damaging the item by using it, so one aspect of collectibles – their “condition” – completely goes away.
The app isn’t live yet, but you can pre-register and buy player packs at this point. The game supports TrustWallet, MetaMask, and Coinbase.