AO Metaverse is back, NFTs keep on stepping onto the courts
The Australian Open (AO) is almost here, but fans can already own a piece of the tournament with the second edition of the AO Artball NFT Collection, while the AO Metaverse team promises to continue the success of the first collection with a bag full of benefits.
2454 NFTs from the collection will be up for grabs
The eagerly awaited 2023 release of the AO Artball NFT collection brings back the Australian Open’s AO Metaverse. Each of the 2454 NFTs of the collection will correlate to a plot on the court with 115 Artballs in a new series.
The Artball NFT holders will be updated in real-time throughout the competition, just like in the previous iteration, to display match information and ball casing enhancements if a match-winning shot lands on the correct plot.
Any AO Artball who scores a match point (the final point that must be won to win a match in tennis) in the Australian Open 2023 court will be eligible for two tickets to the Australian Open 2024 equivalent match. This includes, for example, scoring a match point in the Women’s Singles Final earns two tickets to the 2024 tournament’s Women’s Singles Final.
AO Metaverse aims to build the largest web3 tennis community and provide fans with a new and exciting way to interact with the tournament and other tennis fans.
The 2022 Edition
Since the 2022 edition, the AO ArtBall project team has been striving to assemble a team of collaborators to increase value for its members and open up new possibilities for token-gated activities.
Recently, they announced the launch of a “Collaborator” series that features designs and advantages from well-known projects and businesses, including Collective Shift, Creature World, Crypto Chicks, Chainlink, Decentraland, Joyride Games, Marriott International, Metakey, Opensea, Penfolds, the Nouns Foundation, and many others.
AO ArtBall is a unique combination of sports and innovation that provides fans with a new opportunity to participate in the competition both on and off the court. Access to this membership is provided by the AO ArtBall NFT collection, which consists of 9230 court plots from 2023 and 6776 NFTs from the collections of 2022 and 2023.
The collection gives holders access to premier tennis, sports, events, and unique rewards from leading Web3 projects in both the physical and virtual worlds.
Tennis world is coming to Web3
The AO Artball tournament isn’t the only one to release an NFT collection in the tennis landscape – the 2022 editions of the historically famous Roland Garros and Wimbledon tournaments also featured digital memorabilia.
While the tennis world has seen a significant embrace of the web3 ecosystem by the Grand Slam organizations, the sport is yet to have an ATP initiative that can match the popularity of the NBA Top Shots.
However, Grand Slam’s web3 projects go beyond their surroundings: there are other Web3 initiatives that concentrate on tennis, and some of them are even partners of the AO Artball 2023, such as the ProTennisFam (PTF), or the recent news on Gate.io and World Tennis League partnership.
PTF is a patronage-oriented Web3 tennis collection(s), community, and platform that aims to help discover, support, and develop emerging prospects and established professionals on-chain via the PTF Launchpad and Recruitment Protocol Framework created by the tennis pro athlete Borna Coric.
