Sorare

Sorare is a blockchain-based fantasy sports platform founded in 2018 by Nicolas Julia and Adrien Montfort in Paris, France. The platform lets users collect officially licensed digital player cards, build competitive lineups, and earn prizes based on real-world athletic performance. What began as a niche Ethereum experiment for European football fans has grown into one of the most-funded Web3 consumer applications in existence, with over five million registered users across more than 180 countries, partnerships with more than 300 sports organizations, and a blockchain infrastructure that now runs on Solana.

How the Platform Works

Sorare's core loop is built around three elements: collecting, managing, and competing. Players acquire digital cards representing real-world athletes — footballers, NBA players, or MLB players — each of which exists as a non-fungible token with a unique serial number, verifiable scarcity, and a permanent on-chain ownership record.

Each week, users build squads of five cards and enter competitions. Points accumulate based on the actual on-field performance of the athletes represented — if a striker scores, the corresponding card earns points; if a goalkeeper keeps a clean sheet, that card benefits too. Weekly rankings determine prize distributions, which include additional cards, cryptocurrency, and other rewards.

Card scarcity is a core mechanic. Common cards are freely available but cannot be traded or sold. Rarer cards — Limited, Rare, Super Rare, and Unique — are produced in defined quantities and carry meaningful collector and gameplay value. A Limited card for an in-form Premier League striker, for example, might be issued in a run of a hundred copies worldwide, making it a genuinely scarce asset. All rarity metadata, XP history, and serial numbers are preserved on-chain.

New users can participate in free game modes without an upfront financial commitment, making the platform accessible to casual fans. Competitive play at higher levels, however, requires owning rarer cards purchased on the platform's internal marketplace or on external NFT markets.

Sports and Partnerships

Sorare launched with European football as its sole sport, and the football division remains the platform's flagship. The card catalog spans four of Europe's five major leagues — the English Premier League (partnership signed January 2023), Spain's La Liga, Germany's Bundesliga, and Italy's Serie A — alongside hundreds of clubs and leagues globally. Real Madrid is among the named official partners.

Basketball joined the platform in September 2022 through a deal with the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association. Major League Baseball followed in May 2022. The platform also holds a partnership with Major League Soccer. In total, Sorare has structured licensing agreements with more than 300 sports organizations, giving it one of the broadest official IP portfolios in blockchain gaming.

Blockchain History and the Solana Migration

Sorare's on-chain infrastructure has evolved considerably since launch. The platform originally ran on Ethereum mainnet before migrating to StarkEx, a Layer 2 scaling solution developed by StarkWare, in July 2021. StarkEx allowed Sorare to reduce gas costs and increase transaction throughput, but the platform still faced limitations around external marketplace interoperability and wallet portability.

In October 2025, Sorare announced a significant architectural shift. The platform moved its entire card collection to Solana, reissuing all existing NFTs as compressed Solana NFTs — a technical standard that dramatically reduces on-chain storage costs while preserving scarcity tiers, experience points, metadata, and serial numbers without any action required from users. Simultaneously, user Ethereum balances migrated from StarkEx to Base, Coinbase's Ethereum Layer 2 network.

The migration was completed by the end of October 2025 and was described by the company as "not a replacement, it's an upgrade," positioning the move as a step toward an "open and on-chain sports platform." The rationale for choosing Solana centered on speed — the network processes over 3,500 transactions per second — scalability, and ecosystem openness. Sorare's five million users represent one of the largest consumer application migrations in Web3 history.

The practical consequences for users are significant. Cards previously locked within Sorare's own marketplace can now be stored in external wallets such as Phantom and traded on open Solana NFT marketplaces including Magic Eden. Payments on the platform now support ETH, SOL, and major stablecoins. Sorare has also signaled plans to introduce a platform utility token that would reward users for both gameplay and trading activity, though no firm timeline has been given.

Funding and Investors

Sorare raised a pre-seed round of €550,000 in May 2019, followed by a $4 million round in July 2020 that included former Germany international André Schürrle. A further €3.5 million came in December 2020, with Gerard Piqué among the participants.

The company's scale changed entirely in September 2021, when Sorare closed a $680 million Series B round at a $4.3 billion valuation — at the time one of the largest raises in European tech history. Institutional investors including SoftBank, Accel, and Benchmark participated. Total capital raised exceeds $769 million.

The investor and ambassador list includes some of sport's biggest names. Lionel Messi became an investor and brand ambassador in November 2022. Kylian Mbappé and Serena Williams are also named investors. The combination of mainstream sports credibility and institutional capital placed Sorare in a category few blockchain gaming companies have reached.

Regulatory Context

Sorare operates in a legal environment that continues to evolve around NFT-based fantasy sports. In France, the 2024 JONUM framework established a three-year experimental regulatory period (2024–2027) specifically for digital games like Sorare, providing a degree of legal clarity in its home market.

In the United Kingdom, the situation is more contested. The UK Gambling Commission charged Sorare in September 2024 with providing unlicensed gambling facilities — the first time the UKGC had pursued prosecution against a major Web3 or NFT-based platform. Sorare entered a formal not guilty plea, stating that the Commission "has misunderstood our business and wrongly determined that gambling laws apply to Sorare." The company characterizes the platform as a skill-based game rather than a gambling product.

Following procedural hearings in mid-2025, the trial was postponed and is currently scheduled for June 2027 at Birmingham Magistrates' Court. The outcome of this case is widely watched across the blockchain gaming sector as a bellwether for how regulators will treat NFT-based competitive gaming internationally.

Position in the Solana Ecosystem

Sorare's arrival on Solana is notable for its scale. Five million users migrated in a single structured process, bringing a large, established, sport-literate user base to the network. The use of compressed NFTs at that volume demonstrates a practical application of Solana's capacity for high-throughput consumer applications, and the integration with Phantom Wallet and Magic Eden connects Sorare's player card economy directly into the broader Solana NFT market.

For sports fans already familiar with fantasy leagues, Sorare offers a version of that format with genuine digital ownership, open-market liquidity, and cryptocurrency-denominated prizes. The platform sits at an intersection between licensed sports media, competitive gaming, and digital asset markets — a position few Web3 projects have translated into the kind of mainstream sports licensing portfolio Sorare has assembled.