TAMPA, Fla. -- Fans won't have to wait much longer to get their hands on highly coveted nonfungible tokens featuring Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback and seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady.
DraftKings Marketplace, the NFT ecosystem that will house Brady's Autograph platform, is now live, with Autograph's first preseason pass collection dropping Wednesday and featuring Brady, Wayne Gretzky, Tony Hawk, Naomi Osaka, Derek Jeter and Tiger Woods.
Premier editions of Brady's NFTs will begin dropping throughout the day Wednesday, followed by Signature editions on Friday, featuring authentic digital signatures from Brady. Gretzky will follow Brady as the next athlete showcased.
"NFTs bring an entirely new dimension to the collector experience, and I cannot wait for people to discover and engage with this first ever drop of Autograph's official digital collectibles," said Brady, who co-founded Autograph along with Dillon Rosenblatt. "We created Autograph as a way for fans and collectors to own a piece of iconic moments in sports and entertainment through authenticated and official digital collectibles and we are just getting started!"
NFTs, created in 2014, serve as digital assets of unique items that live online and cannot be duplicated or copied. Think of them as digital trading cards, although they can be anything from autographs, pieces of art, sound clips or video highlights, and because they live in the digital world, they don't run the risk of damage and are easily authenticated.
Fans and collectors with DraftKings accounts can access the line on DraftKings Marketplace on desktop and mobile devices. The companies tout multiple price points to cater to fans just beginning NFT collections as well as more experienced collectors. All DraftKings Marketplace NFTs feature an eco-friendly Ethereum Layer 2 solution for customers to store in their DraftKings Marketplace portfolios, and they will have the ability to transfer the NFTs to their own wallets on Ethereum Mainnet and view their collections on Autograph's platform. Collectors also can list their NFTs on DraftKings Marketplace's secondary sale market.
Brady is one of several prominent NFL athletes involved with NFTs. Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes sold $3.4 million in NFTs in one night alone back in March. Brady's Bucs teammate Rob Gronkowski's NFT trading card collection on OpenSea sold for $1.2 million. And Peyton and Eli Manning created their own line on MakersPlace called the "Manning Legacy Collection."