MetaSports Basketball turns NFT collections into playable characters

Psychedelic, a decentralised studio building Web3 products, has announced the launch of MetaSports Basketball, NFT-based fantasy sports game that will allow its users to port their existing NFT collectibles to mint in-game characters.

For the first time, owners of popular NFT collections including BAYC, Mutant Apes, Cool Cats, and Clonex, will be able to use their existing NFTs to mint new and unique collectibles and utilise them in-game.

Harrison Hines, CEO, and founder of Psychedelic, explained MetaSports Basketball represents the first open character gaming model in the world.

“We envision this becoming a standard in NFT gaming, signaling a move beyond the archetypal fixed character norms, and replacing them with open games where characters can be derived from almost any NFT,” he said.

Each NFT will be granted special attributes based on the rarity and traits of their counterpart NFT.

MetaSports Basketball follows a sports management model where players build their team to compete against others via simulated matches and seasons.

Players will be able to build their teams and franchises by minting, collecting, and trading signature NFT players.

These playable NFTs are procedurally and randomly-generated 3D basketball players with evolving stats and a unique lifecycle that resembles a real-life basketball player’s career.

This will see the players grow from rookies to legends – reflected in their stats and rarity – and even sees them retire.

This ensures a constant rotation on teams and the economy that fosters strategic team-building over time.

Ethereum as base asset layer for MBA NFTs

Players can also decide to build their team with in-game players or bring external NFTs from approved collections and morph them into MetaSports players to build a metaverse-worthy team of any origin, style, and species.

The game will use Ethereum as its base asset layer for MBA NFTs, StarkNet as an orchestration and game reward layer, the Internet Computer for gameplay, logic, and low-value transactions, and also IPFS as a storage redundancy layer and its unique content identifiers for assets.

MetaSports Basketball will leverage Terabethia – Psychedelic’s recently announced cross-network bridge – designed to provide layer 2 functionality and port ERC standards assets, including ERC20, ERC721, or ERC 1155 tokens to the Internet Computer.

Internet Computer was developed by the Dfinity Foundation as a decentralised backbone for web3. It’s a blockchain network that acts as its own cloud, rather than depending on centralised servers like AWS. This creates a fast network that enables easier development.