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Cristiano Ronaldo and Binance are partnering up to offer football fans a chance to own “an iconic piece of sports history.”
“Iconic Piece of Sports History”
Cristiano Ronaldo is getting into NFTs.
The football superstar announced today his exclusive partnership with Binance. Ronaldo stated the multi-year deal would be an opportunity for fans to “own an iconic piece of sports history” and be part of his Web3 community.
“Today we are going to change the NFT game and take football to the next level,” said Ronaldo in a video.
Binance is one of crypto’s largest ecosystems; its major components include the Binance centralized exchange and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). BSC is the second most used blockchain (behind Ethereum), with 407 different protocols built on it and $5.92 billion of value locked.
Despite these impressive metrics, Binance has struggled to foster a thriving native NFT ecosystem. PancakeSwap, Binance’s decentralized exchange and leading protocol, is twentieth in terms of NFT marketplaces, with only $79 million of cumulative trading volume (Ethereum marketplaces such as OpenSea and LooksRare respectively have $31.24 billion and $23.23 billion).
The partnership with Ronaldo could therefore be seen as an attempt by Binance to bring value to BSC and begin increasing the blockchain’s NFT market share. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao “CZ” may have hinted as such on this retweet of the official announcement: “Now, we start.”
Other notable NFT collaborations were also revealed this week, including artist and music producer Pharell Williams’ recent appointment as Chief Brand Officer for the Doodles collection.
Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.