Nicolas Julia, CEO of fantasy sports crypto platform Sorare, expressed his continued faith in Ethereum despite its upcoming transition to Solana, which he referred to as an “upgrade.”
Last Thursday, Sorare announced that it would be moving from Ethereum after six years, taking advantage of Solana’s scalability and user-centric approach. The platform will shift over 10 sports games and their trading cards to Solana.
“This is not a substitution; it’s an enhancement,” Sorare stated at that time. Julia later told Cointelegraph that Solana is the most promising chain for the fantasy sports crypto sector, leading in revenue, daily active addresses, active developers, and total value locked. He acknowledged that while Solana is more centralized than Ethereum, it has prioritized both scalability and security.
“The increasing adoption of [Solana] indicates that this decision was sound,” Julia remarked, highlighting how far Solana has come since its launch five years after Ethereum.
The migration is anticipated to be finalized by the end of this month.
Despite the shift, Sorare’s Julia emphasized their unwavering confidence in the Ethereum ecosystem.
“We remain highly optimistic about it,” Julia stated, adding that they will continue to support Ethereum users via an integration with the Base network and will allow Ether (ETH) deposits.
With a user base of 5 million and a valuation of $4.3 billion as of October 2021, Sorare joins several prominent crypto protocols that have made challenging decisions to migrate from the chain they originally launched on to achieve further growth.
Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch and crypto indexing protocol The Graph are other prominent applications that have transitioned from Ethereum to Solana in recent years.
Sorare focuses primarily on football while also encompassing basketball and baseball, allowing users to buy, sell, and trade officially licensed digital player cards as non-fungible tokens. Users can assemble teams with these cards and compete in weekly tournaments, with rewards tied to real-world player performances.
Sports tokens have lagged behind this bull cycle
Other players in the arena include Flow, Chiliz, and the Dapper Labs-supported NBA Top Shot. The DraftKings Marketplace was notable prior to its closure in July 2024.
The market capitalization for sports crypto tokens currently stands at $1.17 billion, a significant drop from the 2021-2021 bull cycle, according to CoinGecko data.
Amid the broader downturn in the NFT market, Sorare NFTs have also suffered, with their floor price dropping from a peak of $91.25 in early April 2022 to $2.21 as of October 12, according to DappRadar data.
Daily sales for Sorare NFTs have remained consistent, ranging between 5,000 to 30,000 transactions on most days, similar to levels seen in 2022.
Sorare to adopt a multichain approach
Despite the migration, Julia shared that he is exploring other high-speed chains to further scale Sorare’s sports trading cards.
“We’ve assessed numerous options and will continue to monitor the development of high-performance ecosystems like Sui and Aptos while remaining confident in Solana’s current direction.”
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Sorare is also integrating Layer0 for seamless marketplace payments across Solana and Base, aiming to achieve chain-agnostic flexibility and leverage the advantages of multiple ecosystems.
Sorare is not concerned with Solana’s network outages
Julia expressed that he is not particularly worried about the potential impact of a Solana network outage on Sorare, noting that over time, his team has become “accustomed to navigating the inevitable imperfections that accompany blockchain infrastructure.”
“We’ve been greatly reassured by the quality of Solana’s technology, the team behind it, and the network’s recent stability track record,” Julia remarked.
He observed that the frequency of network outages has diminished over time and that they are promptly addressed, demonstrating Solana’s ecosystem’s capability to improve at “remarkable speed.”
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