NHL partners with Sweet to launch NFT marketplace for hockey collectibles

The National Hockey League (NHL), along with The National Hockey League Players' Association (NHLPA) and the NHL Alumni Association (NHLAA) has signed a multiyear partnership agreement with NFT platform Sweet to launch an NFT marketplace. 

The marketplace will release gamified NFTs featuring never-before-issued video moments of the league’s 2022- 2023 season and showcase prominent NHL players including Wayne Gretzky, Tie Domi, Sidney Crosby, Mario Lemieux and others. 

Sweet will build and operate the NFT marketplace, which will offer both exclusive NFT drops and serve as NHL’s official digital collectible marketplace. The marketplace will focus on providing the community engagement experiences through the opportunity to buy, sell, collect and trade never-before-issued NFTs of NHL history.

The NFTs will come in the form of dynamic NFTs, in which the collectibles change overtime based on off-chain events, in this case, the player’s performance throughout the hockey season. A 3D interactive trophy room will be available in the marketplace for holders to showcase their NFT collections. Video NFTs featuring ‘cinematic game highlights from past and present NHL seasons’ and a gamified NFTs with ‘questing and collecting’ for fans to earn perks and rewards. 

‘Building NFTs and digital collectibles that are really cool, have great design and are scarce and have collectible value is absolutely important, but we’re also thinking about what’s the utility beyond that and about how [digital collectibles] plug into the broader fan experience and what that means for the NHL,’ NHL's senior vice president of global partnerships, David Lehanski, told CoinDesk.

The blockchain on which NHL will be minting its NFTs on is not disclosed yet but it is likely to be Polygon or Tezos as it chose Sweet as its partner. The NHL had mentioned that low gas fees and minimizing environmental impacts of its collection is important. 

NHL fans can expect NHL and Sweet to launch the marketplace in October 2022, ahead of the 2022-2023 hockey season.

Photo: Getty