Sorare Boosts Boca Juniors, Cuts the Gas

Sorare, a blockchain-based fantasy football game, is having a busy month — both in what they’re adding, and what they’re cutting. On the plus side, they’ve just added Argentina’s footballing powerhouse, Boca Juniors. And to help reduce the cost of playing along, they’ve found an innovative way to greatly reduce gas prices on Ethereum.

The company, already famous for how they’re transforming the fantasy football world with their NFT know-how, is sure to reap huge rewards from both these moves. Let’s watch the play-by-play…

Sorare signs the home of Maradonna

Boca Juniors are one of the world’s top teams, most famously for being the club where Diego Maradonna played and coached. They have won multiple cups in Argentina and internationally, and are valued at over $213M thanks to their dedicated fan base. They join 137 other clubs already on Sorare.

Users can now bid on players’ trading cards, trade limited-edition cards, and enter tournaments in search of rewards. There are weekly prizes to be won, and with 11 Serie A teams already on board, lots of exciting players to choose from.

Boca Juniors are almost certain to trend upward, which makes their appearance on Sorare timely. By scouting and purchasing rising stars at their start, users can make an investment in the future — and have a chance at winning a random Boca Juniors NFT card, too.

This move solidifies Sorare’s leadership in the sports NFT scene. After signing teams like Caligari Calcio, Genoa CFC, Hellas Verona FC, UC Sampdoria and Udinese Calcio, they were already the brand to beat. With Boca Juniors in the mix, fans and investors are in for a real treat.

Good-bye to gas

One of the biggest challenges with running any Ethereum-based marketplace is the skyrocketing price of gas. And when you’re a system as big and complex as Sorare, those costs can quickly become prohibitively expensive — to users. Buying an NFT card could, depending on the time of day, cost more than the card itself.

That’s why Sorare has partnered with Starkware to use a “Zero Knowledge Proof” solution to cut costs. The technology allows Sorare to bundle transactions together — thousands of on- and off-chain transactions at once. These bundles get processed as a single unit, meaning each participant only pays a fraction of the cost they might have otherwise.

Sorare estimates they will be able to process over 3,000 transactions per second once the system is in place. And it couldn’t come a moment too soon, because last week, data analytics firm Nansen reported that Sorare alone had consumed more than 2% of all gas on Ethereum in the last seven days.

Gas prices have been out of control for a while now, and this is not an actual fix for the problem. It’s a clever workaround to keep a bad situation from feeling worse. But Sorare’s dedication to pushing the envelope should help save their users money — money they would probably rather be spending on cards.