The winners of the Internazionali BNL d’Italia tennis tournament, scheduled for May 8-21, will be taking home “phygital” (physical + digital) trophies. Each trophy will, in other words, have an embedded NFC chip linked to an NFT, which will serve to inscribe the victory on the blockchain. This will, in turn, guarantee the trophy’s authenticity and curb fraud on the secondary market for such items.
The provider of these trophies is a company called Vechain, with headquarters in the tiny European country of San Marino. Vechain describes itself as the “curator” of VechainThor, a platform for smart contracts – the sort of thing that the Ethereum blockchain is known for.
Along with World of V and EXPlus, Vechain will be manning a booth at the tournament to “showcase the power of blockchain” with sport-related phygital items and “phygitalizing” items for passers-by. Tournament attendees will be given bracelets that serve as raffle tickets and bear a QR code that leads to the internet landing page of VeAces, World of V’s NFT collection. The raffle’s 150 winners will receive a phygital sports cap or tickets to the 2023 ATP Finals in Turn.
This is not our first mention of the phygital world. In mid-2020, Decathlon opened a phygital flagship in Dublin, and Tréndico followed suit in March of last year, hoping to blur the line between the on- and offline at its Atleet and Foot on Mars stores. Fiera Milano chief executive Luca Palermo, meanwhile, explained a similar blur to our sister publication Shoe Intelligence late last year. The lockdowns, he said, had demonstrated that trade shows need to be physical. At the same time, it is now inescapable that, whether we’re travelers in an airport or customers in a store, we have all become data.
