NFT
A perfect game of bowling? Soon your friends won’t have to take your word for it – you’ll be able to show off a tokenized achievement, beaten like a NFT on the Avalanche blockchain by the Professional Bowlers Association (PBA).
The PBA and parent company Bowlero today announced the launch of League Bowler Certification (LBC) Awards, NFT-based awards to recognize bowling achievements that will be broadcast free to the approximately 300,000 participants in Bowlero center leagues.
The “digital awards,” as the PBA calls them, cannot be traded or sold once received, which is how they are created soul bound tokens. In that sense, these are not typical NFT collectibles – Bowlero Chief Strategy Officer Lev Ekster described the LBC initiative as “a loyalty program on steroids”.
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Initially, the program will include NFT awards for achievements such as a league player bowling his first game with 200 scores, a perfect game with 300 points, a series of 700 or 800 points in total, or a game scoring with 50 or 100 points above the player’s score. average.
Ekster said the PBA used to provide physical prizes for certain milestones in leagues, including rings, but it had stopped at some point — to the consternation of some dues-paying players. “They were quite disappointed with it,” he admitted.
Bowlero and the PBA partnered with Layer 3 Labs to launch the initiative. Layer 3 CEO Jonathan Teplitsky said the startup specializes in bringing Web2 brands into Web3, but Ekster admitted the move from the physical sports-focused PBA is more like “Web1 to Web3 — we’re making a pretty big leap.” forward as an organization.”
Artwork from one of the PBA’s digital awards. Image: PBA
The PBA will use a special Avalanche subnet to handle the digital prizes for bowlers, which insulates it from potential congestion or problems with the wider network. Layer 3 worked with Avalanche founders and core contributors at Ava Labs on the implementation, and Teplitsky said he wanted to choose a network partner that “has no reputational risk.”
Bowlers were already on board the PBA’s LeaguePals platform to be eligible to receive the digital prizes, and they don’t need to process any cryptocurrency to receive the NFTs. Ekster said the PBA will not use “NFT” terminology when describing the assets for its user base.
“Our community doesn’t know what an NFT is,” he said Decrypt. “They’re not really crypto-native and they don’t understand it, but we call them digital prices.”
However, presenting digital awards is only the first phase of the programme. In the next phase, the PBA offers earnable points that can be exchanged for physical products, such as bowling balls and equipment, or even physical trophies for certain achievements. Avalanche is used to verify the authenticity of an achievement to determine eligibility for physical benefits.
Teplitsky sees possible future expansions to the program, such as the ability to track bowlers’ progress and benefits in one other way around game world, or even unlock real-world perks like special lighting on your lane while bowling at a Bowlero center.
And the broader goal is not to limit this specifically to Bowlero leagues, but to eventually offer the program to leagues at all bowling alleys across America or possibly the world. But since it’s a new initiative, Ekster said they’ll keep it within the Bowlero leagues for now to fine-tune the execution and make sure everything goes according to plan.
If it works as intended and expands widely, Teplitsky sees opportunities for the PBA’s digital prizes program to bring millions of bowlers on board Web3. That’s a more exciting premise for him than pushing another NFT project aimed at high-value traders.
“That’s why I like working with companies, not with ‘projects’. This is the real world, where this is a real business. Valero is valued at billions of dollars and they integrate Web3 into a business model. This is the future,” he said. “We’re not bringing in the same old Web3 folks that their Bored monkeys.”