Drone Racing is Coming to Algorand (ALGO)

The past few months have featured buzz about Play to Earn games and the Metaverse.  This week, the Drone Racing League announced that they’ve partnered with Playground Labs, a web 3 game developer, to create a Play to Earn drone game on the Algorand (ALGO) blockchain.  The pair are still working with the community to flush out details on what they’d want to see out of a drone racing game.  They did say that players will race Drone Racing League drones to earn some form of crypto token and Algorand-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs).  Drones built by the league are valued upward of $2,000 and can travel up to 90 miles per hour.  Given the price tag, it makes sense that a virtual version would make the sport accessible to a much larger audience.

The Drone Racing League has already shown their willingness to experiment in order to stay ahead of the curve.  For example, they’ve added virtual reality goggles to their competitions, so that racers can operate from “within” their drones.  The Drone Racing League is also in the process of adding sports betting to their platform, something with which most major sports leagues were slow to engage with.

The president of the league, Rachel Jacobson, has said “We’re building a roadmap of so many different things in the next several years. We have to know blockchain because we always want to be 10 steps ahead and first to market. We’re going to be Playground Labs’ crown jewel.”

This isn’t Drone Racing’s first interaction with the crypto world; the league announced a five-year, $100m sponsorship deal with Algorand last September.  The news of the game came right after the finals of the Drone Racing League Algorand World Championship’s sixth season.

The Drone Racing League was founded in 2015 and is valued at an estimated $200m.