Exciting Ethereum Game Football.fun is Helping Soccer Fans Earn Crypto Profits.

The rising interest in soccer among crypto enthusiasts is largely fueled by the revival of the English Premier League (EPL) and the emergence of Football.fun—a burgeoning on-chain ecosystem delivering substantial returns to early adopters and soccer fans alike.

This newly launched protocol, based on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, Base, enables users to invest in shares of soccer stars like Lamine Yamal and Kylian Mbappe across elite leagues including the EPL, La Liga, and Bundesliga, rewarding users according to their actual gameplay performance.

The platform fuses the thrill of trading card openings with fantasy sports and crypto trading, witnessing a remarkable growth of over 10x within a few weeks, with the total market cap of player shares soaring from $6 million to over $65 million since August 12.

Previous ventures have introduced soccer fandom to crypto, like the NFT fantasy game Sorare and fan tokens for prominent teams. However, Football.fun is the latest sensation making headlines—here’s how it operates.

How Football.fun operates

Football.fun allows users to trade shares of soccer players from prestigious leagues globally.

These shares symbolize the player in fantasy competitions reflecting their on-field performance and function similarly to crypto tokens, enabling users to speculate on their future worth by trading them like popular crypto assets or meme coins.

This speculation has resulted in substantial profits for early adopters, with the platform experiencing an influx of new users and deposits reaching $17 million, alongside peak daily trading volume exceeding $15 million on August 24, according to a Dune dashboard.

Shares can be purchased through two avenues: the open market using Gold (GOLD), the Football.fun currency pegged 1:1 with USDC, or via packs obtained through tournament points (TP) earned by participating in the platform’s biweekly fantasy contests.

Packs contain shares of four random soccer players and come in three tiers, with the lowest tier offering 8-14 shares and the highest tier providing 285-535 shares for 2,000 TP.

As shares are solely available through packs or the open market, each player’s price is dictated entirely by market forces. Leading players like Yamal and Mbappe are valued at 1.61 GOLD and 1.22 GOLD, respectively—or $1.61 and $1.22 per share.

Shares in less prominent or lower-performing players may be available for as low as $0.02 each.

Engaging with Football.fun

The utility of player shares extends beyond speculation; users can utilize them to form “squads” for participation in biweekly tournaments on the platform.

These squads resemble those in traditional fantasy sports leagues, rising and falling on leaderboards depending on the actual contributions of the players during matches. Players score points for activities like scoring goals and saving shots while losing points for errors such as own goals or squandered chances.

At each tournament, the top-performing soccer players at their respective positions (the top five, and the top three for goalkeepers) receive rewards, ultimately benefiting the Football.fun users who included them in their squads with Tournament Points (TP) and Skill Points, allowing them to promote players to active squads.

Since TP is vital for opening packs, a cycle is created where players are driven to form squads to accumulate TP, and subsequently use TP to acquire shares, which they can either utilize in-game or sell on the market.

However, there’s a catch regarding share usage on Football.fun: users can’t simply acquire all the top players for every tournament.

Each share comes with four “contracts,” allowing a specified number of uses in tournaments. To illustrate, holding a share of Lamine Yamal lets the user include him in a lineup and earn points based on his performance up to four times. After this, they need to pay to extend his contract or acquire additional shares for tournament use.

Despite being in its early stages, the platform has attracted over 12,000 unique depositors for its professional offering, with more than 3 million GOLD available in user balances ready for acquiring shares of new players on the market. Future plans include implementing a scouting system to expand the available pool of soccer players.