How College Athletes Could Earn Crypto for Their Name, Image, and Likeness

Non-fungible tokens (NFT) will be some of the most profitable collectible digital products out there. College athletes can earn from NFTs primarily through licensing their name, image, and likeness. If you’re not sure how to do it, you’re in for a treat.

Athletes can get a lot of money from their name, image, and likeness. It’s exponentially more valuable in crypto too, if you’re looking to get the most out of your NIL. Here’s how college athletes could earn some sweet crypto by banking on their NIL rights.

Understanding NIL Rights For College Athletes

Before we learn how you can make some crypto you can sell or trade, we need to understand the significance of your name, image, and likeness. So, why is it so valuable anyway?

Simply put, the name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights is a type of legislation that allows student-athletes to earn a profit from licensing these three details about them. For a long time, many universities and organizations, NCAA in particular, had a policy of preventing their athletes from earning an income.

Much of this comes from scholarships given to sports representatives and schools earning money from athletes having their NIL rights income go straight to the school. This is now changing, depending on the state you live in.

State legislation now requires schools to let athletes earn a personal income through their NIL rights. In states with no equivalent legislation, schools need to have policies for athletes to follow. Athletes can benefit from sports now beyond the paltry “earnings” they get from scholarships.

The NCAA’s guidelines are limited to preventing boosters from paying athletes and preventing endorsement deals that influence recruitment. This works as a specific stopgap measure until federal legislation occurs.

How NFTs Revolutionize Earnings For Collegiate Sports

One of the most recent ways athletes and celebrities earn money from their name, image, and likeness rights is through non-fungible tokens or NFTs. NFTs come from the same blockchain family as a cryptocurrency but serve more as unique digital collectibles.

NFTs have become a great way to earn income by using them for various purposes. Physical merchandise can work as an infallible certificate of ownership due to the digital ledger recording every historical owner of the token. Its value, however, is in its role as a digital asset.

NFTs can work as virtual assets, similar to in-game items in video games. Because NFT, in reality, is a cryptographic hash record, these tokens can be anything you want them to be. These can be art, images, videos, gifs, trading cards, and even collectibles – everything unique, highly-valued, and the token’s ownership specific to the buyer.

The emergence of NFTs offers a new way for athletes to make money from their NIL rights. College athletes can also get the same benefits as professionals due to the nature of NFT as a product.

How Organizations Take Advantage of NFT Through NIL Rights

One powerful way for athletes to earn money through their NIL rights is to use themselves as their own marketing platform. As NIL rights for athletes are starting to become bargaining chips for pros, taking these details outside their unions’ collective bargaining agreement (CBA).

For college athletes, there’s no clear information if NFTs count outside the policies of schools and the NCAA. Then again, rules will likely change over time, offering an excellent opportunity for collegiate athletes to have a better earning potential.

So far, many of the cases relate to professional athletes in general. NBA, in general, is banking on the trend through NBA Top Shots, selling highlights as a type of digital collectible. A similar situation is happening in different professional leagues, with the NFL and several football associations going for the NFT hype.

College athletes have a chance to earn more crypto by selling their personally branded NFTs. As there are several ways to mint non-fungible tokens yourself, you’re essentially commercializing your images, digital trading cards, collectibles, and even physical merch through NFT.

Taking Advantage Of Your NIL Rights For NFTs

As you mint your personal NIL collectibles, you can expect better returns. Sell the products through smart contracts, with many marketplaces where you can prop up your digital wares for cryptocurrency. What’s excellent about NFTs is that they’re not exploitable by potential buyers.

While buyers can buy, sell, and trade the specific NFTs, athletes will still have full copyright on the tokens. The only problem college athletes will experience is an intermediary website that takes a specific cut of the profits.

Another issue that comes from using marketplaces is the loss of secondary royalties from the resale of the tokens. One specific advantage of NFTs is that their original creators can earn a small percentage of secondary sales royalties for the token.

If athletes don’t want to participate in existing marketplaces, they can create their own through a personal website. Minting is as easy as having a cursory knowledge of smart contracts. You can also control how much royalties you get from secondary sales.

How To Earn From Your Own NIL Rights

Using NFTs as a college athlete opens up several ways to make money from NFTs. Depending on the type of talent you have, you can take advantage of every type of marketable skill. You need to consider first how you can use your NIL for NFTs.

For starters, if you want to go through the traditional route, you can use NFTs as a certificate of authenticity for your merchandise. Athletes usually have merchandise representing them, from jerseys to signed athletic products. To add value, athletes can use NFTs to show that these are one-of-a-kind.

Athletes can also sell NFTs that don’t relate to the sport that they play. Music NFTs are a fantastic option for those who enjoy singing or creating music tracks. You can also create digital trading cards using action shots from your sporting days as an athlete.

The Bottom Line

NFT for college athletes using their name, image, and likeness can be a lucrative way of making money, whether you go professional or not after university. Selling your NFTs can earn you quite a hefty sum of crypto, which can get you through school if you’re still in college or finance a future ahead.

If you’re an athlete trying to see if you can earn something extra with your NIL rights, take a look at NFTs. These should help you make the most out of what you’re training hard for.

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