Today marks the launch of ZenSportsia, a metaverse from ICON-based sports and esports-betting platform ZenSports.
Not quite a metaverse yet, ZenSportsia at present consists of a website, a Discord channel and a whitelist for an NFT minting presale. That said, other features, such as a proprietary NFT marketplace, are promised to be added at a later date. We can definitely say we’re interested to see how this metaverse builds out!
The Website
The guys down at ZenSports really have a fun sense of humor and a great love of sports. Read this excerpt from the “ZenSportsia Story” on their site to get a taste of what this metaverse might be like:
“It’s the year 2138. Professional (and even amateur) athletes have turned into complete beasts. They’re ripped from head-to-toe, their biceps are bigger than AJ Dillon’s legs, and they can run a triathlon on Saturday and still play four quarters of football plus overtime on Sunday. They make Giannis Antetokounmpo look like Glass Joe.”
Gotta love it! The rest of the website is devoted to the upcoming NFT collection, along with a team section to build credibility by illustrating the interesting history of ZenSports, such as their acquisition of a Nevada gaming license following CEO Mark Thomas’ purchase of a truck-stop casino.
The NFTs
The NFTs look very cool! The collection is composed of 10,000 full-body NFTs with 13 unique traits and 214 total attributes, guaranteed to look very different from each other (unlike many other NFT projects). Have a look at a few samples:
If you’re a sports fan, ZenSports is providing some very good reasons to buy their NFTs. ZenSportsia NFT holders are being promised a surprising number of benefits, including (but not limited to):
- Monthly prize drawings for in-person sporting events — they cite an all-expense paid trip for two to watch the Superbowl as an example.
- Esports tournament benefits, including monthly invite-only tournaments, reduced entry fees, mulligan cards, side tournaments, and even special rule sets.
- Annual Esports Tournament Championship Series with significant prize money added.
- Access to exclusive Discord channel with NFT and cryptocurrency giveaways.
- Discount fees and increased rewards across the ZenSports betting app and cryptocurrency trading exchange.
- Exclusive in-person networking events across the globe. For example, World Cup watch parties with food and beverage provided, etc.
- Automatic highest-tier status at all in-person ZenSports locations and casinos (currently Big Wheel Casino in Nevada, but more locations to come soon).
- Earn passive income every time your NFT gets resold (you keep 0.5% of all trading resales).
The NFT collection will launch at 10:00am Eastern Time on March 28, 2022 with a whitelisted presale selling at a 33% discount. There are 1,500 spots available on the whitelist. With 5,000 NFTs available for minting at launch, registered whitelist supporters will have the exclusive chance to mint up to 50% of the 10,000 total NFTs. The presale lasts for 48 hours, after which 4,800 NFTs will be made available for public minting at full price, with the remaining 200 NFTs gifted to the ZenSports team and investors. NFTs minted during the presale will not be revealed until the public sale begins.
If you’re interested in participating in the presale, this blog post explains the sign-up process, or you can click here to go straight to the whitelist registration form.
Now, here’s the kicker: NFTs are being minted on the OpenSea trading marketplace, costing .10 ETH for presale minters or .15 ETH once they open for public sale. That’s right, Ethereum, not ICX. Now, ZenSports has said that they will launch their own NFT marketplace within 2022, but it remains to be seen whether it will be built on ICON 2.0 or another blockchain. The ZenSports app is built on ICON and accepts ICX for payment, so some synergy might be expected. Right?
We’ll get an interview with ZenSports ASAP to answer this question and more. (What other features are coming to the ZenSportsia metaverse? Will there be gaming? Are any ZenSportsia NFTs coming to ICON’s Craft Network or NFT Bazaar? Will ZenSportsia actually become a ‘real’ metaverse?) But for now, all we can share is what we know from the press release and their website.
What else are you wondering about the ZenSportsia metaverse? Let us know in the comments on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, and we’ll be sure to ask them in our interview!
