The tweet you see above is from the official Los Angeles Dodgers Twitter account and was posted on September 7, 2018. My preparation and research for this article had me digging through old tweets, news articles, and photos from various lap tops that I am lucky to still have in my possession.
2018 was a long time ago. It was the world pre Covid-19. Bitcoin/Ethereum had just peaked to $20,000/$1,400 USD before the huge reversal and flush. Early 2018 saw retail awareness of crypto hit all time hype highs. NFTs were still a complete unknown and not embedded in the public’s conscience in any way.
When I heard about the Dodgers NFT giveaway, I was pumped but also nervous. Could they pull this off? How are they going to explain Coinbase, Meta Mask and NFTs to 40,000 people in one night? It’s difficult explaining this stuff to people right now in the year 2021.
They seemed to have a plan, and I was able to track down their instructions here. Please do not try and follow these instructions now. MLB and Lucid Sight have discontinued this project and these Dodger NFTs are a big mystery that the MLB Champions community is still trying to decipher. Lucid Sight and Major League Baseball are still ghosting us, but we will get to the bottom of it.
The first 40,000 fans in attendance on September 21, 2018 received a physical card with a 12 word seed phrase that was hidden but could be scratched off. This card and seed phrase was an Ethereum wallet that could be imported to Meta Mask. The NFT was pre-minted and assigned to the physical card/wallet address that was given out to fans. You can see the contract here. Since their creation, only 1,182 tokens migrated to another wallet.
As far as anyone knows, game developer Lucid Sight stopped supporting the metadata and API for these NFTs in 2019. This brings us to one of the key questions regarding NFTs that no one is really talking or thinking about other than people that were involved in early, defunct NFT projects. What good is an NFT if the creator of the token stops supporting the images and metadata? What happens when NFT creators go out of business or just move on?
The above picture happens…or doesn’t happen? Luckily, most of the first MLB NFTs have images available due to the metadata picked up by NFT tracking sites like Opensea and Cryptoslam. The silver lining is that these MLB NFTs will never completely disappear and the token contracts are etched into the Ethereum blockchain. The NFTs exist in our crypto wallets.
More importantly, sites such as Cryptoslam.io were spawned from a token holder’s innovation and ingenuity. Sometimes, the community brings more value than the company. The 3D viewer that was hosted on the Lucid Sight/MLB marketplace where we initially bought our NFTs is controlled by Lucid Sight and/or Major League Baseball. There are ways to still access this viewer and populate the NFTs in 3D, but it requires extra steps like pulling NFT player DNA from Etherscan contracts and surfing to specific web addresses. Maybe that will be a subject for another article.
The Los Angeles Dodger NFTs from the giveaway are like the NFT version of old baseball cards lost in the attic except they are not lost. The contract accounts for every single token. A lucky few have the minted tokens in their own crypto wallets. There was likely confusion and/or lost giveaway cards. Some physical cards/wallets from that night are being sold on Ebay.
I have many gripes with Lucid Sight and Major League Baseball. There is no excuse for their lack of communication and total disregard for the MLB Champions community. They broke promises (like never delivering on 2018 player badges), but I commend them for seeing the potential of the NFT and being the first major sport related project to try and make something happen in the space. Without them, we would have never gotten NBA Topshot, Sorare or any of the future projects that we know are in development as I type this article.
I love the MLB Champions community members more. They pioneered sports NFTs. They did everything in their power to help make gameplay and the NFTs great. They have exhibited incredible patience and shown me the beauty of the Ethereum blockchain. Many of the successful NFT projects and applications seen today have roots and connections to the MLBC community.
MLB Champions and the Dodger crypto tokens exposed huge lingering questions regarding the future of NFTs that have not been answered yet. MLBC is the test case for when licenses get pulled, and the fine print of terms and conditions are read. Who owns what? How do we make sure all images are available? The fight marches on. We will not stop until we get the answers to these questions.
ARTICLE UPDATE:
On Mother’s Day weekend (May 9, 2021) Lucid Sight updated their MLBC.app website with specific details regarding the Dodger Crypto Tokens.
Etherscan Contract From Photo Above
