The NASDAQ-equivalent fantasy stocks exchange, TradeStars, has launched a new governance token, TSX. It allows users to monetize their sports knowledge based on athletes’ real-time performances.
TradeStars aims to make fantasy sports operate similar to the NASDAQ or NYSE. Each athlete’s real-life performance is tokenized on a fractionable non-fungible token (NFT) market that can be compared to the liquidity pools seen on conventional decentralized exchanges. Users can stake on the increase in value of their favourite athletes performance estimates.
Rather than building a virtual team of players and competing against other users like in the traditional fantasy sports games, TradeStars users build a portfolio of fantasy stocks. Stock prices are managed by an automated market making algorithm in each fractional NFT market, based on the supply and demand, while the payable dividends yield rate is influenced by the tokenized athlete real-life performance.
With more than 30,000 users, TradeStars launched its public “sporting stock exchange” in January 2020 and is now announcing the introduction of its governance token TSX. Ten per cent of the TSX supply is being sold to private investors, and another 10 per cent will be released over the next few weeks in a liquidity mining schedule to the participating users in the platform.
“TradeStars is the first decentralized trading platform for ‘fractional NFTs,’ where economic DeFi incentives are connected to real-life statistical data,” said Christian Hentschel, the founder and CTO of TradeStars.
The team’s past experience in the fantasy sports and crypto-gaming industries, according to Hentschel, boosted the team to then create a new type of fantasy sports game based on on virtual assets that would represent athlete’s real-life performance and DeFi-like gamification incentives.
This ‘fractionable NFT’ according to Mr. Hentschel, is a new type of NFT, which enables NFTs to now be partially owned.
“We came out with the idea of using the ERC-20 standard to represent the NFT fractions, and provide the capability for the NFT to set the price and circulating supply of these shares as a function of the market supply and demand,” he explained.
“Based on real-time and historic statistics, we’ve added another component to the formula that would be a factor of influence, while determining NFT shares’ final price. Similar to the real-world NYSE, the statistical performance metrics would also influence the dividends in the form of TSX, to which supply and demand would then validate its new price.”
TSX will be mined and distributed proportional to a user’s shareholdings performance, creating an incentive on an early opportunity to buy those assets.
“Users can stake their deposits in any of the Fractional NFT Markets,” Mr. Hentschel said.
“By holding our TSX users will be able to receive a proportional of the platform transaction fees (USDT), unlock new Fractional NFT markets, vote and propose platform changes such as transaction fees, NFT markets’ pricing formula, and so on”, he continued.
The Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association reports 70 per cent of fantasy sports players compete in leagues that charge a fee and a player spends an annual average of $653 on fees. In 2018, the global market for all fantasy sports was estimated around $13.9 billion and is projected to grow to $33.2 billion by 2025.
