NBA Action Figures’ Starting Lineup is Back with NFTs After 20years.
🏀 $50 toys with NFT cards are given the Starting Lineup treatment to LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and other athletes.
Starting Lineup action figures were popular in the 1980s and 1990s, providing collectable toy versions of well-known sportsmen from several sports, including basketball, football, and baseball. Currently, Hasbro is resurrecting the brand with costly new versions — and they come with NFT trading cards — more than 20 years after they were last mass-produced.
Pre-orders for Hasbro’s first new range of NBA-themed toys, the Starting Lineup, which includes players like LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and Giannis Antetokounmpo, went live today. The six-inch figures are substantially more poseable than the vintage toys, but they are also significantly more pricey, costing $50 each.
But in addition to the toy and a stand for holding it in the air, the purchase price also includes an NFT trading card from Panini. The trading card company has previously created digital NFT cards based on the NBA, NFL, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and other sports leagues. The company operates its own private blockchain network.
Starting Lineup trading cards have varying levels of rarity, therefore a toy buyer may just receive a common NFT card or they may receive a rarer red, green, or blue version of the card with slightly different artwork. Additionally, each player has a gold NFT that may only be used on one card during a run.
A blockchain technology called an NFT is used to signify ownership of items like digital trading cards, other sports memorabilia, profile photographs, and video game merchandise. Over the course of 2021, the NFT market exploded, resulting in a $25 billion trading volume.
It remains to be seen whether those rarer NFTs will fetch higher resale prices on Panini’s own secondary market, but considering the prior demand for rare NBA Top Shot NFTs, for instance, the NFT hunt may prove to be an alluring feature of the new Starting Lineup value proposition for certain collectors.
The brand-name sports merchandiser Fanatics and the new Starting Lineup toys were introduced earlier this year. These Panini NFT trading cards are not being produced by Candy Digital, Fanatics’ own NFT firm that holds the Major League Baseball license.
The 99-year-old toy company Hasbro has already entered the NFT market by introducing brands like Power Rangers and My Little Pony. In addition, Hasbro collaborated with well-known NFT initiative World of Women to develop a specially branded Monopoly game.
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