- Massively successful NFT collectibles project based on European football
- Use your sorare collectibles to compete in fantasy football
- Runs on Ethereum but accepts a variety of different payment methods
- You can withdraw sorare collectibles to an Ethereum wallet
Sorare Pros & Cons
Pros
Backed and endorsed by well-known footballers like Antoine Greizmann and Gerard Pique
The NFTs have real utility via the associated fantasy sports game
No user identity verification process to worry about and users can withdraw their sorare collectibles
Running on Ethereum allows this platform to operate globally
Backed by Benchmark Venture Capital, Accel Venture Capital, and Ubisoft
Cons
Ethereum blockchain can be expensive for this sort of use case
It’s unclear if they need a blockchain
Cannot be purchased via traditional payment methods such as credit cards and PayPal
Can only use ETH as currency on this platform
Withdrawals are crypto only and Sorare wallet is semi-custodial
How to Buy Sorare NFTs
There are a variety of different ways to purchase Sorare NFTs.
On the base Sorare platform alone, you’ll have three different ways of purchasing different players’ cards. The first method to consider when purchasing Sorare NFTs is the section of new cards that are made available by Sorare on a daily basis. Every day, Sorare issues new cards on their platform, and the new cards are sold via auctions. You’ll need to outbid other players in the game in order to make these purchases and get that next player you need for your team.
If you’d prefer to purchase players on the secondary market, then you’ll need to head to the Manager Sales section. This is where other Sorare users are able to sell they players they have no need for in their current squads. When purchasing NFTs via this method, a flat sales price is used rather than an auction. Finally, it should also be noted that you can message other users of the Sorare platform to see if they’d be willing to sell a specific player that you’ve found on their team. You do this by creating a Direct Offer with a price in ETH for the play you wish to purchase, and the other manager can then decide if they’d like to accept your offer.
You can even include some of your own cards in your offers to purchase other players from other managers. It should be noted that all market activity on Sorare is denominated in ETH, so you’ll need to get your hands on some crypto before you can use this decentralized application. That said, Sorare makes it easy to convert funds in your bank account or on a credit card into ETH at the click of a button. As a side note, it should be noted that Sorare cards work just like any other sort of NFT on the Ethereum blockchain, which means they can also be bought and sold via third-party marketplaces like OpenSea.
History of Sorare
The history of Sorare starts in 2019 when the company originally raised roughly 550,000 euros for the development of their technology. In the summer of 2020, Sorare raised a much larger round of funding at 4 million euros from big names like footballer Andre Schurrle and Ubisoft. Later that year, Sorare raised another 3.5 million euros from footballer Gerard Pique and others.
Over the years, Sorare has also worked closely with various football leagues and teams in order to gain the licensing agreements required to use real players’ names and likenesses in their fantasy sports game and on their trading cards. As of 2021, there are now 140 different football clubs around the world who have partnered with Sorare on their fantasy gaming and NFT platform.
Sorare originally launched in Great Britain back in 2020. In 2021, Ubisoft released their own game built on top of the Sorare NFT collectibles called One-Shot League. Sorare also began releasing cards releated to the national teams in the Euro 2020 tournament as it was being played in 2021.
In 2021, Benchmark led another $50 million funding round for Sorare.
Advantages of Sorare
The biggest advantage of Sorare when compared to other NFT collectibles is that these trading cards have apps built around them that can provide utility value. In other words, these aren’t just NFTs that you can look at on your phone, and you can actually do something with the tokens after you buy them. For many other NFT collectible sets, there is not much real purpose to the tokens existing in the first place. There are already multiple apps in development for different ways you can use your Sorare cards.
Sorare also has an interesting balance of decentralization and usability. Many other NFT platforms find themselves on one of the extreme ends of this spectrum. The extremely centralized platforms usually end up having to implement policies related to Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations, so it is useful to have some decentralization of the platform in order to avoid these kinds of policies that can add friction to the user experience.
It seems Sorare has found a nice balance where there is no identity verification process on the platform, but users are still able to use traditional payment methods like credit cards and bank transfers to get ETH onto the system. Additionally, users are able to export their Sorare NFTs to completely non-custodial Ethereum wallets.
Sorare also has the advantage of being backed by some big names in both investing and the world of football. For example, Benchmark is an investor in Sorare, and they were also early backers of eBay, Uber, Twitter, and Instagram. Accel, which invested in Facebook and Venmo, and Ubisoft have also backed Sorare. In terms of famous footballers supporting the project, Sorare has been backed by the likes of Rio Ferdinand, Gerard Pique, and Antoine Greizmann.
Disadvantages of Sorare
Most of the disadvantages of Sorare involve the aforementioned tradeoffs that the platform makes in terms of decentralization.
The platform is built on Ethereum, which has become rather expensive to use in recent times due to the inherent scalability issues associated with dumping use cases like Sorare onto an open blockchain network. Other platforms have been able to help their users avoid high fees by opting for a less expensive base platform, and at the end of the day, it’s unclear if it makes sense to opt for an expensive building block like a blockchain for something that could probably work on something like a traditional MySQL database.
After all, these NFTs still get their value from the centralized apps that are built around them anyway. It would also be helpful if Sorare integrated more currencies than just ETH. For example, there are a variety of dollar-pegged stablecoins that users may prefer to use in the Sorare economy.
Sorare Frequently Asked Questions
There is a company that backs the Sorare products and services, but this company is not public traded on any stock exchanges. Additionally, there is no token associated with Sorare that can be traded on crypto exchanges. In other words, anyone offering you the ability to engage in any sort of public investment of Sorare is probably trying to scam you.
There are a wide variety of different statistics and analytics websites that can be used to track the data associated with the growing NFT market. If you’re mainly interested in Sorare, then SorareData is going to be your best resource.
There is an official Sorare Discord, and the link to the server can be found on the company’s official website. You should use caution when it comes to any other Discord servers that claim to be representing Sorare in any sort of official capacity.
At this time, Sorare does not release new players via any sort of packs system. All new players are listed on the Sorare website for auction on a daily basis, so the only way to get Sorare NFTs is to purchase them via these auctions or from other players. That said, it would be possible for users to issue their own secondary market packs as a sort of side project on a platform like Opensea.
The open nature of the Sorare platform means that anyone is able to build their own applications that integrate Sorare NFTs. SorareMega is one of these sorts of side applications that allows users to play various games with their Sorare cards.