The gloves of fighters who performed at the UFC 300 tournament will be tokenized on the VeChainThor blockchain. In the future, tokenizing gloves will be implemented after each tournament.
The VeChain team announced the release of the first batch of tokenized gloves for UFC fighters. The project is in partnership with the Ultimate Fighting Championship organization, as confirmed by Dana White, President of the UFC, during a press conference before the UFC 300 tournament.
VeChain is a blockchain platform powered by smart contracts on the VeChainThor energy-efficient L1 network. The platform provides B2B solutions for supply chain management, anti-counterfeiting, and various business process automation.
The project assumes that each pair of gloves will contain NFC chips that will capture data during the fight and, afterward, will allow the authenticity of each pair of gloves to be proven using a smart contract hosted on the VeChainThor blockchain network. In addition, the project will utilize the ToolChain supply chain management system to prevent fraud in the secondary market. The authors of the project note that the initiative is a private example of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization.
The authors envision that after the UFC 300 tournament, athletes will donate their gloves to charity, turning them into collectibles in physical form and NFTs. The first 12 pairs of tokenized gloves will be given to various celebrities as gifts. Joe Rogan was mentioned among such celebrities. In the future, VeChain will tokenize fighters’ gloves after each UFC tournament, collectors and fans will be able to own them.
VeChain and Ultimate Fighting Championship realize the project as partners. The organizations are cooperating in marketing activities since May 2022, when they signed a $100 million sponsorship agreement to promote mixed martial arts.
Tokenization was named by experts surveyed by CP Media as one of the main trends of the Web3 industry in 2024. This opinion has already been repeatedly confirmed in practice. The European Central Bank recently started exploring the possibilities of DLT systems in dealing with tokenized assets. The largest international financial conglomerates are actively interested in the tokenization sphere.
