The Australian Open, Vanguard of Sporting Events: Coming to the Metaverse and Launching a Collection of NFTs

Technology continues to evolve at a rapid rate and the metaverse world is increasingly integrated into our society. Now, also in sports, thanks to the Australian Open, the first major event of the season in world tennis and which for two weeks will focus on the Melbourne Park courts.

The first Grand Slam of the season, which kicked off in its preview format on January 10 (officially starts on the 17th), announced its entry into the metaverse through Decentraland’s virtual reality platform. Thanks to this, users will be able to enjoy all the content of the tournament online while interacting with other users and tennis fans.

Additionally, users will be able to explore a virtual recreation of the AO (Australian Open) grounds for the duration of the tournament, discover the venue, complete challenges, view historical tournament content. All this to bring the fan closer to living an immersive experience that is as close to the real world as possible. In October, Decentraland hosted the popular Metaverse Festival with musical guests and appearances from Deadmau5, 3LAU and Paris Hilton (watch the video here).

For this tournament, which has a global audience of almost 1,000 million spectators, a large influx is expected around its facilities. “We had over 812,000 people attend AO2020, which was a record year for us. It’s understandable that numbers are down in 2021, however we are seeing fantastic ticket sales ahead of AO2022,” said Cedric Cornelis, Chief Commercial Officer of Tennis. Australia.

Innovative NFT platform

For the design of its NFT (non-fungible token) platform, the organization has relied on tennis balls, allowing each user to customize a different digital ball through collaborations with artists from around the world. To purchase these products, they can only do so with the Ethereum cryptocurrency, and it will cost 0.067 ETH each (approximately $220).

“We will use the same technology that measures where a ball lands and the actual metrics used in matches. In this way, we will select the owner to whom each clip will correspond based on where the ball has bounced at match point,” they detailed. the organizers of the Australian Grand Slam.

With all this, the organizers of the Australian Open tournament hope to raise more than 450 ethereums (about 1,475,113 dollars) to recover the losses caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

For his part, Stan Wawrinka, a 36-year-old Swiss tennis player, is the latest athlete (following in the footsteps of Stephen Curry and Tom Brady, among others) to enter the world of digital collections. In it, the 2014 Australian Open winner has joined the Ballman Project, which offers cryptocurrency fans a collection of NFTs from 5,555 digital tennis players.

These digital players have randomly assigned traits like technique, strength, mindset, or tactics that help determine how virtual tournaments perform. Just like real players, their skills (better tennis gear, better shoes, training or rest) can also be upgraded, so the more a player trains and wins, the more valuable the NFT becomes.