Nicolas Julia, the CEO of fantasy sports crypto platform Sorare, expressed his continued confidence in Ethereum, even with the platform’s transition to Solana—a change he calls an “upgrade.”
Last Thursday, Sorare announced it would shift from Ethereum after six years, leveraging Solana’s scalability and user-oriented ecosystem. The company plans to migrate over 10 sports games along with their trading cards to Solana.
“It’s not a replacement, it’s an upgrade,” noted Sorare. Julia elaborated to Cointelegraph, stating that Solana is the most promising chain, as it leads the fantasy sports crypto market in metrics like revenue, daily active users, developer engagement, and total value locked. He acknowledged that while Solana is more centralized than Ethereum, it emphasizes scalability and security.
“[Solana’s] increased adoption demonstrates that this decision was the right one,” Julia remarked, highlighting its success in a short time since its launch five years after Ethereum.
The migration process is anticipated to wrap up by the end of this month.
Despite the migration, Julia maintains that Sorare has not wavered in its support for the Ethereum ecosystem.
“We remain optimistic about it,” Julia stated, pointing out that they will continue to assist Ethereum users through an integration on the Base network, allowing Ether (ETH) deposits as well.
Sorare, which boasts 5 million users and was valued at $4.3 billion in October 2021, is among the leading crypto protocols that have made challenging decisions to shift away from their original chains for growth.
Other notable crypto applications, such as decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch and the crypto indexing protocol The Graph, have also moved from Ethereum to Solana in recent times.
Sorare focuses primarily on fantasy sports in football, but also includes basketball and baseball, allowing users to buy, sell, and trade officially licensed digital player cards as non-fungible tokens. Users can create teams with these cards and compete in weekly tournaments, earning rewards based on actual player performance.
Sports tokens have lagged behind this bull cycle
Competitors in this space include Flow, Chiliz, and Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot. The DraftKings Marketplace was also noteworthy until it ceased operations in July 2024.
The market capitalization for sports crypto tokens is currently $1.17 billion, a significant decline compared to the 2021-2021 bull cycle, according to CoinGecko data.
Sorare NFTs have also faced challenges amid the broader NFT market decline, with their floor price dropping from a high of $91.25 in early April 2022 to $2.21 as of October 12, according to DappRadar data.
Daily NFT sales on Sorare have been consistent, ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 in most days—similar to activity levels seen in 2022.
Sorare to adopt a multichain approach
Despite the migration, Julia mentioned that he is exploring other high-speed chains to enable extensive scaling for Sorare’s sports trading cards.
“We’ve looked at many alternatives and will continue to monitor the development of high-performance ecosystems like Sui and Aptos, while currently remaining confident in Solana’s trajectory.”
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Sorare is also integrating Layer0 for seamless marketplace payments across Solana and Base, as part of its strategy to become chain-agnostic and take advantage of various ecosystems.
Sorare is not concerned with Solana’s network outages
Julia expressed that he isn’t overly worried about Sorare being affected by potential Solana network outages, explaining that his team has grown “accustomed to the usual challenges that come with blockchain technology.”
“We’ve been reassured by the quality of Solana’s technology, the team behind it, and the network’s recent history of stability,” Julia stated.
He indicated that network outages have become less common and are addressed quickly, highlighting Solana’s capacity for improvement at “remarkable speed.”
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