Is it me, or are celebrities and athletes tip-toeing back into web3? I still remember writing about celebrities jumping on the NFT bandwagon over a year ago, featuring Kevin Hart and Chris Brown’s collections.

The best part is that both of these collections can still be minted 😂

Kevin Hart’s Confessions From The Hart

Chris Brown’s Breezyverse

Anyone still interested in entering this arena has to be more prudent and come out the gate with a stronger value prop. What have I been seeing lately?

Museum of Mahomes

Patrick Mahomes, one of the biggest names in the NFL, and his team recently announced the Museum of Mahomes. The platform is the home for Patrick Mahome’s digital collectibles, and all items are redeemable for physical items — special edition sports cards, autographed memorabilia, limited edition merch, 1:1 cards, and other experiences.

This is not Mahomes’ first foray into web3. He released his first Museum of Mahomes collection on Makersplace in early 2021 (the 1/1 sold for $246k at the time!) and is the face of NFL All Day by Dapper Labs.

A couple weeks ago, Museum of Mahomes announced a collab with Azuki, raffling off an exclusive 1/1 physical card to a lucky Azuki holder.

Patrick Mahomes has been publicly posting about the new collection to his 2.5 million followers as well, respect.

Creator League

Last week a new type of Esports league was announced, Creator League. The platform consists of 8 popular gaming creators who would compete and make decisions alongside their community pass holders.

Passes cost $20 and allow holders to have the opportunity to participate in competitions with prizes, vote on benefits and competition strategies, access an exclusive Discord with the creator, and enter giveaways. Part digital collectible, part NFT-like pass that provides access, part DAO-like membership.

What caught my eye was that there was literally no mention of blockchain, NFTs, or even ‘digital collectible’ in the content, website, or FAQs. You could only tell in the checkout flow that the payment would be processed by Coinflow Labs.

Despite this, one of the participating creators noticed the excitement from the NFT space and didn’t like what they saw. CDawgVA shared that he was planning on pulling out of the league as a result.

As the chaos ensued, Creator League postponed the launch and issued a public statement clarifying that the passes are not considered NFTs because they can’t be transferred and that they were only using the NEAR blockchain for data purposes.

I hope the league gets back up and running soon because it’s a pretty awesome concept, blockchain or not.

Parallel TCG

Parallel is an up-and-coming web3 TCG (trading card game) that is starting to gain steam among gamers and notable names in the industry. I need to find some time to play since I got Beta access last week.

But don’t take our word for it, Dillon Francis seems to be a fan as well. The popular DJ recently recorded a 2-minute video of himself opening up several packs of Parallel cards.

Trading card games sound silly for most folks (to be fair, I would partially include myself in this group), but the fan base is strong and they are willing to pay:

Post Malone plays Magic: The Gathering and reportedly purchased a 1/1 card for $2.6 million last month
Marvel Snap is a mobile game that launched just a year ago and has grossed over $100 million in-app purchases

Is web3 gaming close to finding its first hit? 🤞

PS: The company raised $50 million at the peak of the last cycle.

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A song by Justin Bieber tokenizes music royalties

When I initially saw all the headlines about this yesterday, I thought Justin Bieber himself was tokenizing the music royalties, which would be a pretty big deal. However, it’s actually Axident, the producer for Justin Bieber’s song, “Company”. Still cool though.

The 2000 NFTs were sold for ~$28 (.017 ETH) each on anotherblock, and each token is eligible to receive 0.0005% of music streaming royalties, totaling 1% of all royalties.

Would this be worth purchasing for the royalty payouts? Probably not.

I didn’t double check the math, but either way not looking great.

With many things in crypto/web3 (eg: friend.tech), the financial aspects of the spaces are intriguing but at times overemphasized.

Is this a cool collector’s item for Belieber mega fans? Definitely!

As artists (and their producers) enter the tokenization era of music, we’ll continue to see big names pop up on platforms like anotherblock, Royal, and Sound.

Whatever FAIR.XYZ is doing

I have no clue what FAIR (a no-code minting platform for creators) is doing on September 18th, but they have some big names involved.

Familiar NFT collections are a part of the mysterious date, like Pudgy Penguins, y00ts, and Overlord, but this post in particular caught my eye:

Although it is ‘tomorrow’ based on the post, the additional details haven’t arrived yet.

The names in the video include:

Alton Mason: Supermodel
Baz Luhrmann: Directed Elvis, The Great Gatsby, Moulin Rouge
Francesco Ragazzi: Founder of the streetwear brand Palm Angels
J Balvin: Music artist (fun fact: he had his own McDonald’s meal in 2020 lol)
Jeff Koons: Artist
Kate Moss: Model
Kendall Jenner: Model and Kardashian
Millinsky: Designer
Natalia Vodianova: Model (and wife of Antoine Arnault of LVMH, which we know is deep in web3, heh)
Peggy Gou: DJ

Ah ok, I just figured out what they’re (probably) doing lol.

At the end of the video, you get the outro scene:

amfAR = The Foundation for AIDS Research

So we have a superstar-studded onchain charity event happening soon. Awesome!

Whatever Snoop is doing, literally

And when I say ‘whatever’ Snoop is doing, I mean it’s anything he’s doing it seems.

Snoop is using his Bored Ape, Dr. Bombay as a character sidekick to his IRL presence, which is…sorta genius.

Sure you can hate NFTs, but it’s hard to hate Snoop.

Sure you can AI clone yourself, but why not create your own character that doesn’t have to be you?

Sure you can create a character from scratch, but why not build your character off of one you already own?

What has Snoop been doing with Dr. Bombay?

Selling Dr. Bombay toys and giving them to celebrity friends
Showing up to concerts as a mascot and dancing. The Dr. Bombay suit looks high quality too.
The name of his new ice cream line
The face of the Sketchers sneaker collab

I hope they sell out, but I am definitely NOT buying these lol

I only knew about the ice cream line prior to this and holy shit, Snoop is not messing around.

What has changed with celebrities and web3? What hasn’t?

A lot has changed, and some of it hasn’t. Let’s start with the more obvious stuff:

The negative stigma is still strong

Creator League is a good example of this in two ways:

Creator League not mentioning anything about web3, crypto, NFTs, digital collectibles, etc. I was genuinely impressed when I combed the website, FAQs, privacy policy, and other pages and couldn’t find anything
When one of the creators heard that the platform was using blockchain they immediately and publicly stated they would back out

It’s unfortunate that the situation could have been prevented with transparency and education, but the silver lining is that this could be viewed as a test for others to take note of that the negative (and uninformed) sentiment towards this space is alive and well.

Celebrities can’t rely on name alone

With a dwindling web3 consumer base with pockets that have dried up, celebrities and their teams actually have to think about what the value of their digital collectibles can provide. Mahomes does this well and likely took some inspiration from what Dapper Labs has done and repurposed it for his own platform.

What’s also interesting with the Museum of Mahomes is that the team retroactively gave utility for previous collections. Museum of Mahomes I holders could redeem their digital collectibles for physical cards as well.

A graceful reentry for celebrities that may have been previously disgraced (looking at you Kevin Hart and Chris Brown) is actually revamping utility or integrating the OG collections into any new web3 efforts.

Just like how old video games are compatible with new consoles. That’s a simple but impactful advantage of NFTs. “Abandoned” can turn into “Inactive”, or at least that’s the optimistic view.

Web3 is a financial opportunity but in different ways

FAIR’s charitable campaign (assuming that’s what it is based on my sleuthing) with big names shows that there is interest in web3 and it doesn’t have to directly benefit a celebrity’s own pockets.

They could use their celebrity for charitable causes, making it a win-win-win. For the space, for the celebrity, and for the fans.

Celebrities can be indirectly associated with the space

The tokenization of “Company” by Justin Bieber’s producer is an interesting case study.

Did Axident have to get Bieber’s legal approval to tokenize the song?

What if royalties don’t get paid out for some reason and the holders get upset and a huge PR mess happens? Could the music artist sue the person who decided to tokenize the royalties and/or the platform that held the sale for defamation?

I have no clue how this would work, but this is interesting uncharted territory.

Celebrities can be consumers alongside us

As seen with Dillon Francis and Parallel, celebrities are normal people too. They play games, use the bathroom, and fly on private jets every weekend just like us...oh wait.

Most of them probably aren’t public about it, but I imagine there are more celebrities than we think that are fans of the space and are probably participating alongside us. But they’re waiting on the sidelines before making it public, just like many companies.

And then there’s Snoop. You can hate NFTs, but you can’t hate the guy or his hustle. I think I’m going to buy a Dr. Bombay ice cream pint just because of that.

See you next week!

#232: Are Celebrities Coming Back Into Web3?