The days of the bake sale and bottle drive may be numbered if Peninsula Soccer manages to reach its goal of raising $1 million by digital means.
The soccer club, which has about 600 players, hopes to raise the money to build a new weather-proof pitch, and intends to do so by selling non-fungible tokens — they are calling them non-fungible turf — that are digital representations of square metres of artificial turf.
The club hopes that people will donate to buy one of the 5,000 limited edition digital images, some of them complete with portions of digital sideline.
Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are assets that exist as digital creations on a blockchain, a public ledger that records the origin of a digital asset like the turf images.
“We reached out to a number of large brands and local donors, but appreciated it was a lot to ask. We needed to try something else, more community-driven and more ambitious,” said Peninsula Soccer president Rob Byers.
A weather-proof field is the club’s answer to the hundreds of hours of practice and game time that are lost due to bad weather and heavy rain.
The club collaborated with local gaming and marketing studio Frosty Pop to come up with the virtual turf idea.
The images are available at opensea.io, a NFT marketplace. The sale of each square metre of virtual turf will go to the construction of its physical counterpart.
The cost of the project is $1.5 million. Peninsula Soccer says it has already raised about $500,000 via traditional means.
The club will only take the fee of the first sale of each NFT of $200 and the owners of the NFTs are free to further trade, with no commission going to the club.
“The first purchasers of the NFTs are contributing directly to the funds necessary to build the physical turf field in the future — the digital investment has a physical value and direct reward to the young athletes of southern Vancouver Island,” said Frosty Pop partner Greg Stogdon. “Together, this allows all of the NFT owners to be a part of a positive shared experience between the club, its players, and the youth community at large.”
