Nicolas Julia, CEO of fantasy sports crypto platform Sorare, said he remains confident in Ethereum even as the company prepares to migrate to Solana — a transition he has called an “upgrade.”
Last Thursday, Sorare announced that it would migrate from Ethereum after six years, capitalizing on Solana’s scalability and consumer-focused user base. The company will move over 10 sports games and their trading cards to Solana.
“It’s not a replacement, it’s an upgrade,” Sorare said at the time. Julia later explained to Cointelegraph that Solana is the most viable chain, as it leads the fantasy sports crypto vertical in revenue, daily active addresses, active developers and total value locked. While it is more centralized than Ethereum, the blockchain has prioritized scalability and security.
“[Solana’s] growing adoption shows that this bet was the right one,” Julia said, noting that it has covered a lot of ground on Ethereum, given it launched five years later.
The migration is expected to be complete by the end of this month.
Despite the migration, Julia said Sorare hasn’t lost confidence in the Ethereum ecosystem.
“We remain very bullish on it,” Julia said, noting that it would continue supporting Ethereum users through an integration on the Base network and that it would still allow Ether (ETH) deposits.
Sorare, which has amassed 5 million users and was valued at $4.3 billion in October 2021, is one of several blue-chip crypto protocols that have made tough calls to migrate from the chain they launched on to keep growing.
Decentralized exchange aggregator 1inch and crypto indexing protocol The Graph are two other notable crypto applications that have transitioned from Ethereum to Solana in recent years.
Sorare is a fantasy sports platform primarily focused on football, but also features basketball and baseball, where users buy, sell, and trade officially licensed digital player cards as non-fungible tokens. They can create teams with these cards and compete in weekly tournaments, earning rewards based on real-world player performance.
Sports tokens have lagged behind this bull cycle
Other competitors in the space include Flow, Chiliz and the Dapper Labs-backed NBA Top Shot. The DraftKings Marketplace was also prominent before it shut down in July 2024.
The market cap for sports crypto tokens currently sits at $1.17 billion, a considerable fall from the 2021-2021 bull cycle, CoinGecko data shows.
Sorare NFTs have also struggled amid the broader NFT market downturn, with their floor price plunging from a peak of $91.25 in early April 2022 to $2.21 as of Oct. 12, DappRadar data shows.
Daily Sorare NFT sales have remained steady, with anywhere between 5,000 and 30,000 sales on most days — a similar level to that seen in 2022.
Sorare to adopt multichain approach
Despite the migration, Julia said he is considering other high-speed chains that can help it scale Sorare’s sports trading cards as far as possible.
“We’ve considered many options and will continue to keep a close eye on the evolution of high-performance ecosystems like Sui and Aptos, while remaining confident in Solana’s trajectory for now.”
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It is also integrating Layer0 to operate marketplace payments seamlessly across Solana and Base as part of its plan to become chain-agnostic and leverage the strengths of multiple ecosystems.
Sorare is not concerned with Solana’s network outages
Julia said he isn’t overly concerned about Sorare falling victim to a Solana network outage, noting that over the years, his team has become “well accustomed to working through the inevitable imperfections that come with blockchain infrastructure.”
“We’ve been more than reassured by the quality of Solana’s technology, the team behind it, and the network’s recent track record of stability,” Julia said.
He noted the network outages have become less frequent over time and are addressed swiftly, showing the Solana ecosystem’s ability to improve at “remarkable speed.”
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