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0 CommentsPorsche, the world-known luxury sports car manufacturer, wants to join the digital economy, to remain innovative. Now it’s eyeing NFTs, the latest investor fashion. Startup Fanzone has been launched to issue collectible non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Porsche’s digital subsidiary spun off a new minority-owned company, called Fanzone, issuing non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to collect and trade.
While trying to expand its field of interest to online gaming and digital entertainment, Porsche depicts athletes on the cards instead of its own iconic cars.
“The demand for classic trading cards and albums has been unbroken for decades. With Fanzone, we are now digitizing this promising market,” wrote Christian Knörle, head of company building at Porsche Digital.
November 2020, triggered by the growing fame of NFTs, Claudio Weck, a Porsche Digitals developer, left the company to work on Fanzone with two cofounders. For the launch of the startup, they partnered with Germany’s Football Association, whose national team won the World Cup in 2014.
Fanzone plans to depict on cards the men’s squad of the national team, a favorite in the 2021 European football tournament, and the Under-21 team, which won its own European youth tournament this year, as well as the women’s team that twice conquered the world title.
NFTs for Fanzone’s trading cards are secured by the Lukso blockchain, developed by the Berlin coder, who’s also known as an author of Ethereum’s ERC-20 digital token standard. According to Porsche, the platform provides new marketing channels for sports institutions, which tend to NFT technology.
Dirk Weyel, chief executive of Fanzone, admitted: “We are convinced that innovative, digital interaction platforms between sports fans and their favorite teams offer huge growth potential. That’s why we’re excited to be able to build such a platform sustainably with a strong partner like Forward31,” he added.
Now, Fanzone is backed by Forward31, Volkswagen Group’s own startup incubator, named after the year when Ferdinand Porsche founded his first engineering office.
