Liverpool will continue to monitor their entry into the NFT sector but admits that it was necessary to test the waters in such a burgeoning business.
The LFC Heroes Club, the Reds’ inaugural NFT collection, was presented last week in collaboration with renowned London auction house Sotheby’s.
While it was a welcome step into an emerging market for some community members, it drew a lot of criticism from others due to widespread skepticism about a market that has been flooded with new players in recent months.
Many players were accused of presenting worthless items as investment opportunities and negatively impacting the environment due to the energy consumption required to mint NFTs.
Liverpool drew inspiration from Sports gripping the NFT market
Sport has been grappling with the NFT market for well over a year. When the NBA debuted its NBA Top Shot collection, which includes artwork and highlight clips that fans could purchase, they were the first to get into it.
As of October last year, it had brought in over $600 million for the NBA, even though the early surge, when sales peaked at $224 million, had faded to nearly a third of that by the end of the year.
It has arrived in football, with teams and leagues worldwide moving into NFTs, including the Premier League, which has its own contract in the works.
Liverpool has been watching over the previous 12 to 18 months, with their entry into NFTs last week the result of a year’s worth of effort, including reaching out to the Spirit of Shankly fans club for their ideas. SOS has stated that they do not support NFTs and expect the club to make any risks known to fans and keep them under regular evaluation.
Liverpool’s LFC Heroes Club debut is on the lower end of the pricing scale, roughly £55. The club produced two types of digital collectibles: a set of 24 one-of-a-kind “Legendary” NFTs and a series of generative “Hero Edition” NFTs.
Liverpool has teamed with Polygon, a blockchain that mints NFTs via proof of stake.
Crisp added that the choice to cooperate with them was based on the fact that proof of stake has a lower environmental effect than proof of work, which has long been the foundation of large networks like Ethereum, but they have now shifted to proof of stake after the turn of the year.
Crisp explained,
“Because of how it trades contracts and how those contracts are mined inside its network, the longer-running Ethereum blockchain consumes a lot of energy.”
The Polygon network may group transactions into bigger chunks before sending them to the Ethereum network for contract exchange.