Ronaldo buys Mumbai Indians NFTs

Mumbai: Even as the Indi an cricket ecosystem is ta king its own time waking up to the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTS), one of the world's best-known footbal lers Cristiano Ronaldo has already taken the plunge.

Cricket fans are in for a pleasant surprise as Cristiano-led compa ny CR7, along with a clutch of leading glo bal investors are in vesting $100 million (about Rs 760 crore) in FanCraze, the city-head quartered cricket NFT com pany. This is expected to be one of the largest-ever seri es-A funding rounds in the NFT space in Asia.

NFTs are unique digital items store stored on a blockchain, the same net work that runs cryptocur rencies. NFTs act as trade able certificates of authen ticity for digital art, memo rabilia or fan merchandise.

New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Part ners, B Capital, Tiger Global.b, Coatue Management, Sequoia Capital India and other investors are learnt to be on-board alongside Ronaldo's company.

"The capital will be used to integrate new sports relationships to fund FanCraze's continued expansion," a source said. FanCraze plans to grow its R&D lab, user experience team, gaming studio and marketplace platforms, alongsi de scaling up of eng ineering, marketing and customer-relations teams.

The startup has already tied up with the Internatio nal Cricket Council (ICC) and Cricket West Indies (CWI) as their official digital collectibles partner. Lea ding Indian cricket players Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bum rah, Shikhar Dhawan, Ravi chandran Ashwin and Yuz vendra Chahal have also sig ned up with FanCraze.

Cricket has one of the largest fan followings in the region. Both the televi sion and internet-based streaming services took off on the heels of live cricket.