Crypto News: Digital Sports Collectibles are the ‘New Baseball Cards’
By: Mike Murphy
Tags: Baseball, Crypto, Sports, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin

If you enjoyed sports as a child then you may have had an affinity for baseball cards. Small pieces of cardboard paper with your heroes on the front and miniature numbers on the back representing that player’s stats.

These trading cards were as good as money ‘back in the day’. Children would be given packs of these cards for their birthday or other events — sometimes kids would buy the cards themselves. But once they had the cards, and some valuable ones for that matter, it was then time to trade.

For children, the act of trading cards was likely the first time they would negotiate with a person their age.

In 2018, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology has provided us with a new way to trade baseball cards. Digital Crypto Collectibles present a secure and decentralized way to collect digital assets.

Many of you will probably scoff at this and ask: “who in the world would want to collect digital cards?”

As it turns out, the market for these cryptocurrencies is massive. Digital collectible card games (CCGs) will generate $1.5 billion (yes Billion with a ‘B’) in 2018! It is projected that this market will generate $2 billion worldwide by 2020.

Those who are in this market generally play collect, trade, and hunt these digital assets on their phones and enjoy collecting these cards by partaking in tournaments or games. However, 3/4 of these players usually buy additional digital collectibles in addition to the ones they earn/collect.

Major League Baseball is officially the first sport to take advantage of the market by partnering with Lucid Sight to release crypto baseball cards that feature players from all 30 major league franchises. They will aim to release 15,000 crypto collectibles before the end of the 2018 season.

“That is 100% one of the strategic goals of this initiative,” said Kenny Gersh, MLB’s executive VP of gaming and new business ventures. “Collecting items related to your team, engaging with your team in a new way. For me, say the Red Sox win the division in a couple months, I want to buy something that symbolizes that. These will be event-based things — those moments in sports that happen that you want to remember and cherish, and have a sense that you were there, even if only digitally.”

What this Means for Crypto…

This is a sign that millennials are starting to embrace the changes in technology specifically blockchain and cryptocurrencies. According to a study in 2013, the average age of digital card collectors was just under 22-years-old, and it’s pretty safe to say that the age has probably not differed too much since 2013.

If anything, the age of users has probably become younger.

Blockchain technology is becoming more widespread and advanced each day. People around the globe are beginning to adopt the concept and treat it like it is a second-coming of the internet.

What these digital collectibles are doing is integrating the younger generations into accepting blockchain and cryptocurrencies as a normality. This similar to how the generation prior began accepting high-speed computers and smartphones as the norm. Soon enough blockchain won’t be a concept but rather a necessity for everyday life, to interact and trade valued items in a decentralized way.