The NFL will offer free NFT virtual commemorative tickets for attendees of over 100 regular-season games next season.
The NFTs are minted on the Flow blockchain. Last season’s NFT ticket stubs were minted on Ethereum scaling platform, Polygon.
The National Football League (NFL) first experimented with giving away commemorative NFT ticket stubs to attendees of select live games last season, and now the league plans on bringing the initiative to significantly more games for the 2022 season.
Today, the NFL announced that it will offer NFT ticket stubs to attendees of more than 100 live regular season games during the 2022 season. As with last year, the NFT virtual commemorative ticket initiative is being held in partnership with events ticketing giant, Ticketmaster. Currently, 101 total games are listed for the promotion.
The NFL’s expanded NFT virtual commemorative ticket initiative will include every single first-week game, starting with the Buffalo Bills vs. the Los Angeles Rams on September 8 at SoFi Stadium. Additionally, each of the league’s 32 teams will offer NFT ticket stubs for at least three home games over the course of the season.
“We still are in the test-and-learn phase of all of these NFT explorations,” said Abby Desai, who works on the NFL’s Club Business Development team. “But we wanted to do something that all 32 clubs would be able to engage with and offer to their fans on a local level.”
The NFL offered virtual ticket NFT collectibles for 21 regular season games last season, along with 12 postseason games, the Pro Bowl, and the Super Bowl. All told, the league said that it distributed more than 500,000 total NFT ticket collectibles during the season.
This season’s virtual commemorative ticket NFTs will be minted on Flow, the same blockchain network used for the NFL All Day video collectibles platform. Last season’s NFT ticket stubs were minted on Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain, but the league and Ticketmaster switched to Flow starting with the Super Bowl.
An NFT works like a proof of ownership for an item, including digital goods like artwork and collectibles. The NFT market ballooned in 2021, yielding $25 billion worth of trading volume, and sports collectibles—including NBA Top Shot—helped introduce the premise of tokenized digital collectibles to mainstream audiences.
