WTF is ItsMyne?

ITSMYNE is an NFT marketplace that caught our attention for a few reasons. We all know NFTs are trending, and OpenSea leaves a lot to be desired, so niche marketplaces are emerging. ITSMYNE is focused squarely on official sports NFTs.

From collectibles like trading cards to fan tokens of some of the world's most famous athletes and teams, this marketplace empowers sports enthusiasts to use their fiat money and cryptocurrencies to buy, trade and talk about digital collectibles in one common, curated platform.

As a result of the increasing dominance of the sports sector in the NFT marketplace segment, many sports leagues, federations, and affiliated businesses are entering the blockchain space - launching tokens, selling naming rights, NFTizing their assets. Not sure who's reading this, so let's back up before we face forward!

NFT in Sports

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) represent two types of assets – tangible and non-tangible. They get a unique value once they receive permission for tokenization. Companies create NFTs by collaborating with respective blockchains to ensure that they provide transaction security.

Sports NFT marketplaces give the sports industry an additional avenue to make money while directly engaging with fans. For example, NBA Top Shot made the most of this opportunity by starting its own NBA-themed digital collectibles marketplace. Here’s how the concept works:

Many people who couldn’t watch the games live settle for watching the highlights. However, many fan simply want to see the best highlights of the night. The NBA sports marketplace started recording the matches and clipped these unique moments, including unbelievable dunks and game-winners, and uploaded them online to the respective NFT marketplace. This attracted a lot of views among NBA fans who wanted to see (and own) these amazing moments, each representative of a unique moment in sports history. The process led to the marketplace making a hefty revenue ($700M in 12 months), thanks to a passionate community of basketball fans and NFT HOLDers from across the globe.

You may wonder how the ITSMYNE sports NFT marketplace is different from the conventional marketplace. Well, the traditional marketplace model is purely transactional and doesn’t pay attention to community interactions between the community members and from community members to the sellers. On the other hand, the social-plus NFT marketplace, which is how ITSMYNE is defined, is just the opposite. It gives a platform where viewers can enjoy to their fullest instead of thinking about how much money they can afford to spend. A curated community of NFT HOLDers, traders and sports enthusiasts can engage with each other, as well as with the NFT publishers. This means that ITSMYNE's social community empowers sports fans and NFT enthusiasts to make trades, manage their portfolios, discuss opportunities and get digestible market insights. 

ITSMYNE, Made Simple

The core concept behind ITSMYNE is that every product becomes its best version when it becomes social (think Amazon reviews). In other words, companies that focus on incorporating a social element in their core product experience have a better chance of earning a higher revenue and attaining higher valuations than products that don’t necessarily have a social angle. 

For example, the value of the Assassin’s Creed gaming franchise is approximately $300 million. But Fortnite, its social counterpart, managed to earn a revenue of approximately $2 billion in the last year alone! This proves the point that you can significantly increase your revenue if your product has a social angle.

Why does this happen? It’s because the value of social platforms is much higher, thanks to their higher user engagement, better defensibility, longer retention, and stronger growth loops.

ITSMYNE believes in this school of thought. It’s a mobile-first platform that allows sports fans to trade digital collectibles. With a custodial wallet and the flexibility to pay with both fiat and crypto, ITSMYNE makes it easy for Web 2.0 audiences to participate in the NFT revolution. With ITSMYNE, you can sign up and start collecting in under one minute! Forget about the hassles of funding a crypto wallet, storing private keys, and linking the wallet to your marketplace account.

Consider ITSMYNE as the Reddit for buying and trading official sports NFTs. Think of NBA Top Shot meets Reddit. Another comparable is to think of ITSMYNE as the eToro for NFTs.

Similar to as on Reddit, fans on ITSMYNE can upvote or downvote NFTs and social chatter (comments), with a native “points” system that enables the best NFTs and social chatter to rise to the top in a democratic manner.

ITSMYNE nudges such fan engagement by rewarding fans who show consistent community engagement and add value to the social chatter on the platform. These rewards are provided in form of $MYNE tokens and ITSMYNE Stars, both of which enable fans to become whitelisted for VIP Drops, participate in fractional ownership pools, and get exclusive experiences and swag from their favorite leagues, teams and athletes.

Niche NFT Marketplaces

The concept of bringing sports fans under one roof is exciting, but the platform needs to make sure that every transaction is secure and doesn’t lead to online fraud. Fortunately, ITSMYNE takes care of that as it’s one of the few green NFT platforms based on a climate-neutral blockchain. It follows the NEAR Protocol that has four main criteria:

• Secure financial components
• Harness the “internet of value”
• Build community-owned apps
• Operate at consumer speed

One of the factors that make ITSMYNE a unique marketplace is that it allows sports fans to trade NFTs officially licensed by their favorite sports teams. In fact, this inclusive platform goes a step further to allow sports fans to use their coveted fiat money and cryptocurrencies, while enabling easy sign-up and storage with a custodial storage wallet.

Two reasons stand out why this decision is beneficial for sports fans: first, they can purchase and use officially-licensed NFTs. Secondly, they get fractional ownership opportunity of high-value NFTs.

ITSMYNE is roping in Tier I sports brands that would help them access various engaged communities, and the announcements regarding these partnerships will be announced in the days to come.

Converting sports collectibles into NFT

As already mentioned, ITSMYNE allows sports fans to buy, trade and talk about various types of digital sports collectibles online. But what are these collectibles and how can you convert them into your preferred NFT currency? Here are some of the types of collectibles that you should know about.

1. Trading cards

Trading cards give you the chance to interact with other sports fans of the same team online. The location of the fans doesn’t matter because ITSMYNE is open for everyone. It brings fans of different teams from different countries under one roof so that they can trade from one marketplace. Fans can exchange their trading cards to diversify the number of players from different teams in their portfolios. This is where interaction would play a crucial role as fans would have to talk to each other to exchange their cards, thus ticking the box of user engagement for ITSMYNE.

2. Sports kits (aka Utility or Asset-backed NFTs)

Many fans like to purchase the sports kits of players from their favorite teams. Since they are not available so easily, they are left disappointed in most of their attempts. Even if they are available, their prices may be so high that interested people may not be able to afford them. ITSMYNE has plans to change that concept altogether by allowing them to purchase sports kits from the NFT marketplace. The sports kit may include a player’s shoes, jerseys, or coolers. Sometimes they can also get new jerseys signed by their favorite players or personalized t-shirts with their photos.

3. Video clips (aka Collectibles and More!)

As mentioned earlier, video clips get millions of views because fans want to see the most talked-about moments of the games. This makes video clips profitable for the sports industry as they generate a massive amount of money as the number of views goes up.