MLB Partners With Lucid Sight To Launch Crypto Baseball

Lucid Sight, a blockchain gaming company, has signed a licensing deal with Major League Baseball to launch MLB Crypto Baseball.

According to Yahoo Finance, the app allows users to pay in ethereum for digital avatars tied to specific moments in recent games. They can then sell the items, as well as earn rewards and stickers.

“We talked a long time ago about bitcoin and whether we should accept it as payment for MLB.tv and some of our other products, and we opted not to,” said Kenny Gersh, MLB’s executive VP of gaming and new business ventures. “At the end of the day we decided that isn’t our business, we’re not in the speculation business. We’re in the business of delivering baseball to fans. So this game is a more interesting intersection of blockchain technology and what we do.”

The most popular blockchain game currently is CryptoKitties, where users buy and trade unique digital kittens, and pay for them in ether. The game launched in November and users have so far spent $25 million worth of ether on it.

“We were already talking to Lucid Sight around the time that CryptoKitties first came out,” Gersh noted, “and then CryptoKitties sort of validated it a little bit more.”

With in-person attendance at ballparks at an alarming low this season, the MLB is hoping that the game could encourage young fans to buy more tickets.

“That is 100% one of the strategic goals of this initiative,” Gersh said. “Collecting items related to your team, engaging with your team in a new way. For me, say the Red Sox win the division in a couple months, I want to buy something that symbolizes that. These will be event-based things — those moments in sports that happen that you want to remember and cherish, and have a sense that you were there, even if only digitally.”