Courtside Ventures and Alpaca VC led a $3.5 million round to fund Swoops’ NFT basketball game. DraftKings (NASDAQ), CEO Jason Robins. Red Beard Ventures. Slow Ventures. Gary Vee were all part of this round.

“This is truly a game of skill with multiple user profiles and journeys, whether that be owner, investor, or manager. The goal here is not just to be a simple game, but rather a full ecosystem for others to build upon,” Alpaca VC General Partner David Goldberg said.

Every token represents an in-game character, with a special skill set or attributes. There will be 500 NFTs on initially, and then the remainder 10,000 tokens can tap on the Polygon sidechain that will become available to public miners this summer.

The IP rights of players will be owned by the NFT owners. And interestingly, each player’s attributes, stats, and appearance will change as the character ages over time.

Swoops will also launch a free version of the game. This will be after NFTs have been minted in May. In addition, Swoops is planning to host tournaments in September, where NFT holders can play and earn winnings, with further plans for a real-life Swoops conference in Miami for the game’s most passionate fans. Manish Sinha, co-founder of Swoops and chief executive officer said that:

Swoops believes that basketball is one of the most popular major sports. We are working with NFT technology and other applications to improve the game. We plan to turn the core assets in sports – the players – into assets that fans can own, trade and stake on.

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