NEAR and SailGP Partner on Ground-Breaking New Sports DAO

NEAR is excited to announce a new partnership with SailGP, one of the world’s fastest-growing sailing events. As part of this ground-breaking multi-year partnership, SailGP will explore the sale of a new team to a DAO launched on the NEAR Protocol – a first-of-its-kind community engagement and activation platform in professional sports.

SailGP’s DAO will fuse professional sports with community-focused engagement, giving fans and crypto natives alike a new way to engage and gain access to their favorite teams, athletes, and related events. 

Under the current SailGP Teams’ Participation Agreement, this new DAO team could join the SailGP starting line-up for Season 4 in 2023.

“We welcome NEAR to the SailGP family and we are looking forward to them participating in the most exciting racing on-water, featuring the world’s best sailors,” SailGP Founder Larry Ellison said.

How SailGP’s NEAR DAO will work

Like any other DAO, the SailGP team DAO will be a community project. Through proposals, the SailGP team DAO’s community members  will help determine athlete selection, team management, commercialization options, operations, and overall team strategy.

The SailGP DAO will be a big departure from traditional sports team ownership structures. It will help reimagine sports communities, where fans have a say in how teams form and evolve.  

Other NEAR and SailGP partnership initiatives

SailGP and NEAR will partner for a number of other new and exciting projects to help inspire a new generation of Web3 developers to build on NEAR.

Beyond DAOs, NEAR and SailGP will collaborate on integrated technology and research and development projects in events ticketing, NFT and gaming offerings, and mobile app integration. NEAR will also use SailGP’s global technology platform to develop real-world intellectual property and Web3 applications for fan engagement, data delivery and management, league management, and more. 

NEAR will also create on-site experiences and activations at global SailGP events to help traditional industries transition to Web3 through NEAR’s simple, secure, and scalable blockchain platform. These events will be open to both new and existing NEAR community members. 

“Our mission is to enable community-driven innovation to benefit people around the world, and this partnership is a fantastic example of exactly that,” said Marieke Flament, CEO of the NEAR Foundation, the non-for profit entity that oversees development on the NEAR blockchain. 

“We are ushering in a brand-new era of entertainment by combining sports and technology to elevate the fan experience to a level that has never been seen before, and we’re proud to be leading the way alongside a like-minded organization that shares our core values and vision.”

IMG, SailGP’s global agency for sponsorship, media rights and host venue rights, helped facilitate NEAR’s partnership with SailGP. (IMG is part of Endeavor, a strategic investor in SailGP.) 

“This deal presents an exciting opportunity to change how fans can directly influence and participate in the sports they love,” said Mark Shapiro, President of Endeavor. “We are proud to have brokered this ground-breaking partnership which is the culmination of what happens when sport, technology and entertainment collide.”