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Ecosystem
October 30, 2021
Partner Spotlight: Fantastec SWAP brings Real Madrid and fútbol to Flow
Guest
Partner Spotlight: Fantastec SWAP brings Real Madrid and fútbol to Flow

This is a guest post from the Fantastec SWAP team.

Hey everyone! We are Fantastec SWAP, a London based sports tech company with the mission to produce the best NFTs in sports. Our highly diverse team is all sports mad, so committed to serving all fans the opportunity to engage more deeply with the sports, teams and athletes they love.

Fantastec is a unique blend of engineers, data analysts, designers, scientists, researchers, sports marketing professionals, creatives, and communication personnel. We are technology-led but solution agnostic with meaningful collaborations around the corner and across the globe.  We specialise in sports NFTs with our SWAP app, which allows fans to create official sports NFT collections of magical moments and exclusive content.

Fantastec SWAP launched in 2018, producing NFTs with three of Europe’s biggest football clubs, Arsenal, Borussia Dortmund and Real Madrid. Our vision was to create emotional and economic ‘value’ for global sports fans. SWAP NFTs set out to achieve this vision in the way they visually preserve the sporting moments through video and photo animation that can mean a great deal personally to each individual fan. 

Our NFTs have been crafted by an extremely diverse and talented team of designers and animators, to produce a variety of NFTs, including goal videos, snapshots of iconic moments, behind the scenes footage, and authentic digital signatures just to name a few product features.

Fantastec SWAP has also delivered a number of NFT firsts since its launch with the release of the first-ever women’s sports team NFT collection. We continue to explore the best ways to ensure our user experience is second to none when acquiring and coveting the best NFTs in sports.

Our team has always aimed to be a community-driven platform as we are continuously talking, listening, sharing and exploring ideas with users to understand how they want their NFT experience shaped for the future. Using endless user testing for SWAP designs and all current and upcoming features, we have established a multinational community of users and fans from across the globe. Everything we do is “For The Fans” and our two way relationship is pivotal in ensuring we are poised and ready for the opportunities a blockchain like Flow, underpinning our app, can bring.

With lots of exciting collections to purchase on our primary market, and SWAP’s full migration to Flow in the coming weeks, the owners of the millions of SWAP NFTs in circulation globally will soon have the option to sell these highly prized NFTs on our secondary market. The addition of Flow to the SWAP ecosystem will provide a secondary market for global SWAP fans to earn economic value from their fandom. SWAP will therefore be the only platform where you can SWAP or SELL your NFTs to other users in the community. It’s an exciting milestone and one of our powerful new features that worldwide fans can utilise on our platform.

Our NFTs are available on a mobile app, broadening their accessibility to millions of global smartphone users to access the world of NFTs from their pocket.

SWAP has a simple and fast onboarding experience to allow new users quick and easy access. We have devised exciting ‘Play to Earn’ features that reward fans with exclusive NFTs and unique prizes as they collect NFTs through sports collections which tell a story. Such features include a rewards ladder and leaderboards that encourage our users to try to expand their NFT collection to win official merchandise and exclusive experiences.

Finally, with the introduction of a web app to augment the mobile app experience in Fall 2021, we are excited to use our partnership with Dapper Labs through Flow to launch a series of exciting new features for global sports fans to foster community and share passions.

In our discussions with Roham and Mik at Dapper Labs, it was obvious they not only shared the same fan-first vision that we have at Fantastec but they were implementing it into future actions on Flow.

So, adding Flow's to support our primary and secondary markets made sense to us and our fans spread across 220 countries and territories.

Commitment to low transaction costs was very keen in our minds.  At the time Ethereum transaction fees of 20-100$ per transaction were normal, which to us meant a destruction of value from our fans. That’s an artificial barrier caused by the Proof of Work protocol.  Flow’s Proof of Stake keeps that value in the fans pockets, whilst also consuming far less energy in the process.

And there’s Flow’s legacy.  We’re building on the shoulders of giants in the blockchain space. They’ve a proven track record, a proven use case that matches almost exactly our own.  In the end, there was no contest.

The developer experience also has a couple of deciding factors, which very much appealed to us, in that the features gave us higher confidence that the code we wrote would not be prone to simple error from the outset.

For example, the resource orientated nature of the Cadence language is a very good solution to a simple problem not so easily or reliably solved in other paradigms.  

The ACID nature of transactions are a godsend, no clear up required if operations fail, except the small cost in the wallet. Paying on behalf of the user and removing unnecessary wallet interactions makes a much better user experience.

On-chain accounts, another great feature.  On-chain storage; well that opens up possibilities we haven’t dreamt of yet!

Flow continues to innovate on their technology, and Fantastec’s Tech Team is looking forward to contributing back to the Flow community with developer features we’re designing to make the engineering experience on Flow even more attractive and accessible.

On the back of selling our first 1/1 NFTs at $25,000 each, our highest price point yet as of September 2021, we have just launched our new season official NFTs for Real Madrid showcasing moments from the 2021/22 season. More collections from this season, including goals and exclusive moments will be coming soon at the rarest and most valuable levels, so be sure not to miss out. 

Furthermore, we have exciting upcoming drop campaigns coming soon, which were an incredible success last season with frequent drops selling out in less than an hour. Be sure to watch out for these drops as it will allow you the chance to collect the rarest NFTs by purchasing lower level packs.

Finally, we are currently in a lot of ongoing talks with sports clubs and sports organisations from across the globe to continue to expand our ever-growing SWAP NFT platform. Stay tuned for lots of exciting announcements coming soon and join our Discord channel (https://discord.gg/7zh4m2k) to not miss out and engage with other SWAP users!