Production of new digital collectibles and promotion of the game went dormant early in the 2020 season without any formal explanation from either Lucid Sight or MLB.
MLB declined to comment on why they are moving on from MLB Champions, while Lucid Sight did not respond to several requests for comment. While Dapper Labs and the NBA reportedly receive a cut of peer-to-peer sales of Top Shot moments, it is unclear whether Lucid Sight or MLB will continue to profit from transactions involving MLB Champions NFTs on sites like OpenSea and CryptoSlam.
After releasing full collections in 2018 and 2019, Lucid Sight minted only a few MLB Champions figures in 2020 before going silent without explanation. The company had been keeping users up to date on new developments via a Discord server but hasn’t made any announcements since June. As recently as this week, loyal fans of the game and collectibles have sought out the developer on social media to ask what the future holds for MLB Champions.
Allen Hena, a software engineer in the health care space who moonlights as a blockchain technology consultant and was an early MLB Champions collector, said the project gained traction with a community of collectors despite mismanagement by Lucid Sight, which failed to roll out new features on time and to align its NFT releases with the MLB calendar.
“They were involved in too many other projects,” Hena said. “They just didn't understand baseball, they didn’t understand NFTs, they didn’t understand fantasy baseball.”
Toner said there was considerable “community buy-in,” and that users offered Lucid Sight numerous suggestions on how they could produce a better game and grow the Champions community.
Both Hena and Toner, however, praised Lucid Sight for designing MLB Champions NFTs to function within the broader NFT ecosystem. MLB Champions NFTs exist on the decentralized Ethereum blockchain, meaning collectors can buy, sell and trade the figures outside of the project’s now-defunct native marketplace and store them within their own cryptocurrency wallets alongside other NFTs.
This setup offers users much more freedom than Top Shot, which is built on Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain and doesn’t allow collectors to trade their “moments” on outside marketplaces or view them outside of the Top Shot ecosystem.
It also means that MLB Champions NFTs will live on long after the program’s demise.
“The beautiful part about this, in a way, is the company going out of business becomes social proof that these things can survive,” Toner said.
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