- The Australian Open sold NFTs linked to its metaverse tournament, which ran parallel to the live event.
- The price of bids for the NFT where champion Rafael Nadal’s winning shot landed has surged more than 4,000%.
- The AO Art Balls have seen $4.4 million in trading volume since January, according to OpenSea data.
Australian Open champions Ash Barty and Rafael Nadal weren’t the only winners from the tennis tournament, which played out in a dedicated metaverse at the same time it did in Melbourne.
Some NFT buyers in the Grand Slam contest’s AO metaverse scored gains after the stars’ historic victories at the weekend, though they might regret selling their pieces too soon.
Rather than foam fingers or match programs, fans attending matches in the metaverse had the chance to buy an AO Art Ball non-fungible token, or NFT, linked to a specific individual part of the court.
The NFTs were generated before the competition, and released through a public drop where users could pay to mint an AO Art Ball from the 6,776 available.
After each match, the AO metaverse team collected data on where the winning shot in each real-world contest landed, then assigned this to a particular NFT.
The virtual memorabilia proved more popular than the Australian Open team expected, according to Ridley Palmer, metaverse and NFT project manager for Tennis Australia.
“At no point did we anticipate we’d sell out the public drop in three minutes,” Palmer told Insider. “As a result, we’ve set the bar extremely high for what NFT’s can become in the future.”
The metaverse — virtual worlds where people create avatars to explore and interact with others — has taken off in recent months,…
