The Sorare story begins in late 2018, between Nicolas Julia (CEO) and Adrien Montfort (CTO). A former ad man turned tech, Julia worked at Stratumn, a blockchain fintech, where he met Montfort, who ran the tech side after a stint at Paymium, another blockchain fintech.

On paper, the idea behind Sorare is nothing original. It’s a mix of fantasy leagues, where players compete in one sport or another using avatars of real players, and collectibles, meaning card collections, the kind you knew from Pokemon, Magic or Panini. You collect cards, which have stats, and you play with them against other players.

The real revolution is using the blockchain and turning every card into an NFT.

The original value proposition is play-to-earn. In other words, instead of stupidly playing and spending your money, you can make some. At the time, this kind of game is exploding: Axie Infinity, Illuvium, Gods Unchained and Splinterlands inspire a whole crowd of people between 2017 and 2019. For publishers, it’s a genuine money machine. Because when the Pokémon Company sells cards, it has to design them, print them, pack them, ship them, get them distributed and so on. Which cuts the margin by at least 70 to 80%. For play-to-earn, the cost is limited to designing the card and sending it (roughly speaking) onto the blockchain…

That said, at launch Sorare is a dwarf in a micro-market, with a positioning unlike that of the games that work, which are closer to hardcore gamer geek standards. At the same time, the first NFT collections that we’ll hear about again later appear, such as the CryptoPunks.

But what will make everyone take off has nothing to do with games. It has to do with crypto.