Benzinga and Yahoo Finance LLC may earn commission or revenue on some items through the links below.

Former NBA player Tristan Thompson is trying to reimagine fan engagement with a blockchain-based platform.

​

“Sports engagement is stuck in the past,” Thompson said on X last week, adding that he intended to change the status quo with a platform called basketball.fun.

​

Basketball.fun is a fantasy basketball platform that will launch on Somnia, a newly-launched blockchain purpose-built to support large-scale applications, Thompson said in another X post last week. The platform said that it will launch on the opening night of the NBA season, scheduled for Oct. 21.

Don’t Miss:

​

Basketball.fun will tokenize NBA players instead of adopting the typical fan token model popularized by projects like Socios, CoinDesk reported, citing a press release. The value assigned to player-themed tokens will fluctuate in real time in response to sentiment and performance, the outlet reported. Fans will earn from speculating on rising talent, according to CoinDesk.

​

Thompson is partnering with Improbable CEO Herman Narula and co-founder Hadi Teherany to launch the project, CoinDesk reported.

​

“The way fans value and perceive players should be different than owners and news networks,” Teherany told CoinDesk. “We’re trying to give power back to the fan — not just to predict who they think is great, but to actually earn incentives from it. Imagine being able to prove that the fan consensus on a rookie’s potential is more accurate than a team’s front office.”

Trending: Shaquille O’Neal wants people to take heart health seriously — this AI-ECG could make that easier.

​

Teherany also told CoinDesk that the decision not to launch a token for basketball.fun was partly informed by experiences from a previous project called TracyAI, a basketball-focused AI agent also launched by Thompson. According to Teherany, the project has become too dependent on the token performance. The project’s token TRACY was last trading at $0.000078, down 99.6% from its February price record of $0.018.

​

Thompson has become a vocal advocate of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology in recent years. He has cited the missed opportunity to put all or part of an $82 million 2015 contract in Bitcoin as motivation to educate others, especially younger players in the NBA, about the industry. As part of this effort, he recently launched a podcast called “Courtside Crypto.”