Meet the startup building a marketplace for users to own officially-licensed NFTs by top international cricketers

With Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) emerging as one of the hottest trends in technology and media in 2021, more startups are entering the space each day. The global NFT market witnessed over $23 billion in trading volume in 2021, as per crypto-data analysis platform DappRadar.

Building communities of like-minded individuals is usually at the core of NFT businesses looking to capitalise on this trend. For entrepreneur Ankit Wadhwa, India’s massive community of cricket fans is the best place to start.

In Gurugram in 2021, he started Rario, one of India’s earliest cricket-based NFT platforms with a marketplace feature for users to buy, sell and trade Rario NFTs, and presenting cricket fans with a digital collector's experience.

In an interview with The Decrypting Story, Ankit says:

“In terms of number of fans, cricket is arguably the second biggest sport in the world, after football. We’ve all been fans of cricketers, so I wanted to bring cricket fandom to the world of NFTs through Rario, and enable fans to engage with their favourite cricketers and own iconic moments from cricket history.”

NFTs are essentially virtual assets that have no tangible form but can be sold like any other piece of property. They are a form of unique cryptographic tokens on a blockchain like Ethereum or Binance Smart Chain.

They are virtual collectables whose ownership is traceable on blockchain, thereby allowing a particular NFT to be owned by a single individual.

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The Rario edge

Current and former cricketers such as Virender Sehwag, Zaheer Khan, Rishabh Pant, Smriti Mandhana, Shafali Verma, AB De Villiers, Shakib Al Hassan, and Faf du Plessis have signed up for NFTs of their player cards, video moments etc to be available for users on Rario’s marketplace.

Rario has also secured the exclusive NFT rights for the Caribbean Premier League, T10, and Lanka Premier League.

Explaining the potential for a cricket-based NFT marketplace, Ankit says:

“In other Western sports, I found 30-35 percent of sport revenue comes from merchandise sales, collectibles, and affiliate revenue. But this was not true for cricket. In the cricket world, revenue came in only from broadcasts, sponsorships, and ads. There was no real monetisation of fandom, besides fantasy sport platforms.”

In fact, the success of fantasy sport platforms like Dream 11 had shown Ankit that users found the intersection of cricket and digital spaces interesting, and were willing to pay to participate.

Further, authentic physical merchandise such as player jerseys were too expensive for the Indian market, and were prone to piracy.

Therefore, Ankit identified a white space in terms of taking cricket merchandise to the digital realm, and solving for authenticity using blockchain.

“Officially-issued NFTs are verifiable. People can wear fake cricket jerseys, but they cannot do anything with a ‘fake NFT’. This particular use case of blockchain technology can redefine fandom for the entire cricket ecosystem. But we are still early, and there is no playbook that a business can replicate. We are the first officially-licensed cricket NFT platform,” Ankit says.

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Building on Ethereum and Polygon

In terms of its blockchain tech, Rario is part of the Ethereum ecosystem, the most popular network for NFTs.

Because Ethereum was not originally designed to handle the scale that users currently demand of it, a number of Layer 2 (L2) side-chains have emerged to insulate businesses like Rario from the main layer’s high transaction costs and slow speeds.

“We are built on Polygon, which is an L2 solution on Ethereum. For us, transaction costs are negligible and not paid by the user, so for them, the transaction cost of trading NFTs is free. Further, the time to execute transactions is low enough to provide a comfortable user experience for a consumer business like Rario,” Ankit says.

Ethereum’s strong developer community and high liquidity also help Rario’s case.

Leveraging such blockchains to tokenise a wide variety of digital assets is now an area of interest for many upcoming Indian founder-led NFT businesses.

The likes of colexion, GuardianLink, Ikonz, Diginoor, Vibranium, and several others are building their unique approaches to make the most of this emerging market.

“Digital collectibles are just the first step. As NFTs hit the world of sports by storm, we are excited to be the torchbearer for NFTs in India’s cricket community. There are going to be many more use cases for NFTs, and many businesses are experimenting in the space, and looking at each other as well. Thus, fan and community feedback is becoming more essential by the day,’ Ankit says.