How Will LiveLike Bring More Utility to Your NFTs?
How Will LiveLike Bring More Utility to Your NFTs?
The first-ever NFT was minted in 2014, and just seven years later, in February of 2022, the market cap of Art Blocks NFT projects available on the Ethereum blockchain and listed on OpenSea was worth roughly 828 million US dollars.
Nowadays, NFTs seem to be everywhere and can take many forms including art pieces, collectibles, domain names, event tickets, video-game items, virtual land, memes, and more. Despite their abundance, however, NFTs are still often poorly understood by people who don’t work directly in the NFT space, and who find themselves asking the same question: “What is the point of an NFT?”
This is a tough question to answer as the NFT market is still at a very early stage and is set to evolve significantly over the next few years. But one thing is for sure, the popularity of NFTs and the global NFT market will only continue to rise if, firstly, the access to NFTs is simplified as much as possible so it can be accepted by global audiences; and secondly, if there are more identifiable utilities associated with NFTs to help sustain and reinforce the market over time.
Before diving in to this crucial conversation around NFT utility, check out our NFT announcement video:
So, What Do We Mean By Bringing Utility to an NFT?
When you’re planning on investing in an NFT, you’re likely not doing so simply because you find that specific NFT—whether it’s a piece of art, an event ticket, or a domain name—particularly beautiful or impressive or extraordinary. Of course, that can play a major role in your decision, but it’s probably not the sole appeal. Instead, you’re likely also investing in an NFT to be a part of a community.
The appeal of being part of an NFT community, and what’s often responsible for incentivizing NFT buyers in general, is the exciting, redeemable perks that come with it. In short, minting an NFT with utility gives you access to a community where you’re then granted admission to enjoy exclusive benefits that can be digital as well as physical.
Take Crypto Baristas as an example: The “fun, caffeine-inspired NFTs whose purchase supports real-life coffee initiatives”. Crypto Baristas have launched a small collection of NFTs with the goal of opening the world’s first NFT-funded café in New York, supporting coffee supply chains, doubling down on sustainability, and improving the livelihoods of coffee-growing communities.
Holders of Crypto Baristas NFTs receive caffeinated perks for life at all future brand café spaces, exclusive coffees from Coffee Bros., and discounts on Crypto Baristas merchandise. As you can see, the investment in a Crypto Baristas NFT has a double utility here; not only do you get advantages like free coffee, you also contribute to a project that matters and makes a difference (and bonus appeal if you’re a caffeine lover!).
Measuring the Value of NFTs
At the start of the NFT craze, the value of NFTs was mainly measured by their scarcity and the reputation of the people behind their creation. The understanding was that if the founding team members seemed skilled and resolute, the public reputation was thriving and majorly positive, and the actual products were so exclusive and obscure, then the launch was sure to be a success.
This is how things typically went in terms of selling NFTs in the earlier days—specifically more artistic NFT projects that would be coveted by a niche group of people who held interest in either the space of NFTs or art collection. The more famous you were or the more hype you built around your project, the better chances you had at success, and you’d better not screw up your pre-launch reputation or the value of your NFT project may diminish.
Of course, these types of artistic NFT projects that target buyers who understand the ins and outs of NFTs will still exist as the NFT space evolves. But the reality is that in order to democratize NFTs and have them exist in the mainstream, reputation and scarcity won’t be enough to make people realize the value they will acquire over time and invest in them.
Should Every NFT Have Utility?
While some projects rely on utility as a key driver for people to purchase them, the short answer is no. Why not? Because it depends on what kind of NFT you’re looking to purchase or mint.
If you are going to mint a digital artwork or a meme, it is best to think of it as if you were buying a physical painting or drawing, where the appeal is not necessarily its use. And similarly to purchasing a physical piece of art, NFT artwork will come with a public certificate of authenticity and ownership despite being issued by the blockchain in which the artwork or meme is stored.
On the contrary, and for some other categories of NFTs such as collectibles or gaming items, the added utility can help to empower an NFTs’ value and increase its demand even further.
Why Utility is Becoming More Important in the NFT Space
Simply put, utility NFTs are growing in importance because scarcity, reputation, proof of ownership, and certificates of authenticity are no longer enough incentive. People want to invest in an NFT because of its long-term value, not its bragging rights.
Buyers are starting to ask: What can I achieve with my NFT? What am I getting out of this? How is this purchase benefitting me?
This is where the utility layer can provide answers and strengthen the value of NFTs, ultimately helping to democratize NFTs. We are already seeing a lot of opportunities and use cases arising in the gaming industry with utility NFTs: In some cases, holders of utility NFTs are able to use their NFT to gain access to exclusive items in multiple games; in others, a holder’s avatar is able to wear NFT fashion items. And with more and more integration of utility in these industries, it is becoming a crucial factor of staying competitive in the NFT space in general.
So, How Can LiveLive Help Bring Utility to Your NFT?
The NFT space has opened up a whole new world of opportunity for consumer interaction, brand storytelling, and engagement through digital goods. Since our Audience Engagement Suite was created to reinforce connections with users through interactive features and to reward fan behaviors with points and badges, it was natural for us to further investigate how we could use the power of NFTs to further drive engagement.
We truly see our platform as a gateway for Plug and Play utility for NFTs. It’s no longer only about collecting items in your wallet or being part of a community; it‘s about creating additional ways to incentivize all NFT holders with advantages and gated experiences within digital platforms. Our main goal now is to combineNFTs with our loyalty and rewards features to make them even more attractive and useful.
Through the LiveLike CMS and our Proof of Interaction API, you’ll be able to link NFTs with any specific rewards and experiences of your choice. For example, the Golden State Warriors listed their first NFT collection last year and have planned a new drop this month, as a build up to the 2022 playoff season.
The GSW roadmap includes both digital prizes (ex. Ticket Stub NFTs) and physical prizes (signed jerseys) for every round victory. Using our API solution could enable them to extend the scope of utility for their NFT holders, offering them new experiences such as virtual one-on-one discussions with players, Ask Me Anything sessions with the coaches, access to private group chats, significant discounts on merch and ticketing, access to premium content, emojis, stickers, and more.
Expanding the NFT utility layer using our Audience Engagement Suite will help organizations to increase the reach of their collections and seamlessly onboard more and more non-crypto native users. It could also help them bring more value to their NFT collections, reinforcing the appeal and subsequently the demand for them.
Want to learn more about how LiveLike can help you bring utility to your NFTs?
The LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite is a finalist in the region's leading broadcast technology awards, recognising the fan engagement platform's work with sports broadcasters and rights holders
New York, July 31 - LiveLike, the fan engagement platform used by sports broadcasters, streaming services and rights holders worldwide, has been shortlisted for Best in Sports at the BroadcastPro ME Manufacturer Awards 2026 for the LiveLike Audience Engagement Suite.
The awards recognise product innovation, engineering excellence and technology development across the broadcast ecosystem. Finalists were selected across 21 broadcast and satellite categories following industry-wide voting and review by an independent panel of experts. Winners will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2026 at The Westin Dubai Mina Seyahi Beach Resort & Marina in Dubai, UAE.
The Audience Engagement Suite gives broadcasters and rights holders a way to build interactive experiences directly into their streams and owned platforms - predictions, quizzes, live chat, rewards, loyalty programmes and community hubs - without assembling separate point solutions for each one. Every interaction feeds a single evolving profile of the fan, which the platform then uses to personalise what that fan is offered next.
That combination is the argument LiveLike has been making across the industry this year. Fan engagement has been mischaracterised as a set of features layered onto a broadcast, when the durable value sits underneath: the behavioural graph that every interaction contributes to, and the AI layer operating on top of it. LiveLike's AI layer, Genie, now runs a growing share of the programmes the company operates on behalf of clients, moving the work from manual content management toward automated orchestration.
The Middle East and North Africa is one of the most active regions in the world for this shift. Major tournament rights, rapid growth in sports streaming and rising expectations around second-screen and in-stream interaction have made direct-to-fan engagement a commercial priority for broadcasters across the region rather than an experiment.
"Fan engagement gets treated as a set of features bolted onto a broadcast, and we've never seen it that way," said Miheer Walavalkar, co-founder and CEO of LiveLike. "What we build sits underneath the experience. There are the surfaces fans actually touch, and then there is the profile of that fan which gets sharper every time they touch one. The second part is the part that compounds, and it's the reason a broadcaster can keep getting more out of the platform in year three than they did in year one."
"Being shortlisted in a category assessed by the people who operate live sport in this region carries weight," he added. "They know the difference between something that demos well and something that holds up on a match night."
Sports organisations have spent decades refining three core revenue streams: direct fan spend, media rights, and sponsorship. The playbook is well understood. What is less understood, and far less developed, is the data infrastructure that connects those streams to each other and to the fans who power all of them.
Most organisations know they are sitting on significant amounts of fan data. Ticketing systems, CRM platforms, social channels, digital content interactions: the signals are there. But in the vast majority of cases, that data sits in disconnected silos, producing consulting reports rather than actionable intelligence. The result is a fragmented picture of the fan - one that limits commercial potential across every revenue line.
On a recent episode of Future of Fandom, LiveLike CEO and co-founder Miheer Walavalkar sat down with Aidan Cooney, CEO of Envision Sport Group and co-founder of Opta, to unpack this problem in detail. Cooney has spent 25 years building data and fan intelligence businesses across football, cricket, tennis, and rugby. His perspective on unified fan data, the shift from B2B to B2C thinking, and the convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing offers a practical framework for any organisation trying to move beyond fragmented data toward genuine sports intelligence.
From performance data to fan data: the Opta origin story
Cooney's career started with a simple hypothesis. In the late 1990s, football's status as the world's biggest sport came with surprisingly thin storytelling. Broadcasts offered a scoreline, occasional possession graphics, and goalscorer information. American sports, by contrast, had long used statistics to bring audiences closer to the action.
"If you give fans a higher-resolution understanding of what's happening on the pitch, you bring them closer to the sport they love," Cooney explained. That principle drove the creation of Opta, which transformed how football was analysed, discussed, and consumed. The OptaJoe account became a case study in sports data storytelling, building a following of hundreds of thousands across media, journalism, and the broader sports industry.
But Opta was fundamentally about what happened on the pitch. The return path - how fans reacted to that information and what their behaviour revealed - became the foundation for everything Cooney built next: Ellipse Data, InCrowd, and ultimately Cortex.
The difference between a customer data platform and a fan data platform
One of the most important distinctions Cooney drew in the conversation is the gap between conventional customer data platforms and what a fan data platform actually needs to do. Standard CDPs are designed for rational, price-sensitive purchasers. A fan is something else entirely.
"A fan wants to belong. They're passionate about the player or the team they support. The data that matters to you is very different from a purely rational, transactional data proposition," Cooney said.
The implication is that transactional data - which most sports organisations have invested in through ticketing CRM - is necessary but insufficient. Behavioural data is where the real value sits: how a fan reacts to a particular piece of content, when they react, whether content about a specific player activates more engagement than content about the team as a whole. This is the layer that informs personalisation, shapes content strategy, and ultimately creates trackable, monetizable assets for brand partnerships.
Cooney's platform, Cortex, is designed specifically for this purpose: unifying transactional and behavioural data into a single fan data platform that can activate across channels. LiveLike's engagement and gamification tools then sit on top of that foundation, turning data into community and interaction into measurable value.
The silo problem and why unification comes first
When asked about the most common mistakes sports organisations make with their data, Cooney's answer was immediate: silos.
"Very few organisations have a true single view of their fan base. That is the starting point for everything." Some silos are functional, built by design for specific use cases like ticket sales. Others are structural, created by the relationship between leagues and clubs or by the patchwork of technology vendors an organisation has accumulated over time.
The cost of these silos is not abstract. Without a unified single view, organisations cannot connect their content strategy to their commercial strategy. They cannot attribute sponsorship value to specific fan interactions. They cannot retarget fans who engaged with a poll, a vote, or a piece of branded content. Every disconnected system represents lost compounding value.
Cooney's prescription is direct: "You can't activate until you unify." And the use cases for doing so - from personalised content delivery to integrated brand campaigns - are available now in ways they were not five or even three years ago.
Sponsorship, media, and the hybrid model
One of the most commercially significant ideas in the conversation was Cooney's framing of the convergence between sponsorship and performance marketing. Sponsorship, in its traditional form, has not fundamentally changed since Mark McCormack and Arnold Palmer in the 1960s. It remains an awareness play, hard to attribute, and increasingly constrained as a share of total brand marketing spend.
Performance marketing budgets, by contrast, are growing rapidly. Social media ads, YouTube pre-rolls, programmatic buying: brands are spending heavily on audience acquisition through channels that offer clear attribution. The problem for sports properties is that these two budget pools rarely connect.
"If you create a more diverse set of assets and present them as an integrated media plan, you open up new budget areas within brands," Cooney argued. The opportunity for rights holders is to bridge that gap by combining the premium, trust-based qualities of sponsorship with the attribution model of performance marketing.
In practice, this looks like branded content paired with interactive fan experiences - polls, votes, and predictions that generate first-party data - which can then be used for retargeting and attribution. LiveLike's interactive tools are designed to create exactly these kinds of measurable, brand-integrated fan touchpoints that produce both engagement data and commercial inventory.
AI, personalisation, and the crawl-walk-run path
Both Cooney and Walavalkar addressed the promise and the practical limits of AI-driven fan personalisation. The long-term vision is clear: AI that can serve individual fans with content, offers, and experiences tailored to their specific behaviours and preferences. The economics and infrastructure to do this at true 1-to-1 scale, Walavalkar noted, are still being worked out across every industry.
The pragmatic starting point is cohort-based personalisation. Group fans by location, by behavioural patterns captured in your fan data platform, by engagement tendencies during comebacks or winning streaks. Let cohorts emerge dynamically from the data rather than relying on predefined segments.
"By putting the fan at the centre and serving them at the cohort level, you improve the fan experience, which drives up engagement levels, which drives up the value of the inventory you create on the back of it," Cooney said. "If you then take it to the next level and use AI to super-serve the individual, you drive that engagement and value further."
The compounding logic here is critical. Organisations that delay building cohort-based personalisation while waiting for perfect 1-to-1 capabilities lose years of compounding value - both in fan engagement and in commercial inventory quality.
The B2C shift and why it matters now
Cooney's overarching thesis is that sports organisations are fundamentally B2B businesses today, structured around selling rights to broadcasters and sponsorship packages to brands. The future is B2C: direct, data-informed relationships with fans that create value for both the organisation and its brand partners.
This does not necessarily mean streaming video direct to fans - a path Cooney sees as extremely difficult given the sophistication of existing broadcasters. It means building digital properties that offer genuine value to fans, capturing the behavioural data those interactions generate, and using that data to create a fan balance sheet that reflects the true economic potential of the audience.
"The whole original idea, that the fan base becomes a real balance sheet item, becomes a reality," Cooney said. "And that balance sheet isn't just about the lifetime value of the fan to the sports organisation directly. It's about lifetime value, plus the opportunity for brands to invest in that person over the duration of their fandom."
Listen to the full episode
Hear the full conversation between Aidan Cooney and Miheer Walavalkar on Future of Fandom:
A unified single view of the fan is the prerequisite for every commercial use case in sport, yet most organisations still operate with fragmented data silos.
Fan data platforms differ from standard CDPs because fan behaviour is emotional, making behavioural signals more commercially valuable than transactional data alone.
The convergence of sponsorship and performance marketing opens access to larger brand budgets, but only if rights holders can offer integrated media plans with measurable, interactive assets.
Cohort-based personalisation is the practical starting point for AI-driven fan engagement - delaying it sacrifices years of compounding value in engagement and revenue.
Organisations that treat their fan base as a balance sheet asset - and build the data infrastructure to
LiveLike, the digital fan engagement platform, is powering eight confirmed World Cup activations spanning North America, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, marking the company's largest simultaneous global deployment to date. The activations cover a cross-section of the sports media ecosystem, from major broadcasters and OTT platforms to payment providers and national football associations.
The deployments demonstrate LiveLike's capacity to operate at tournament scale, handling concurrent traffic spikes across time zones as billions of fans follow the world's most-watched sporting event. Activations range from prediction games (Play Predictor+) and loyalty leaderboards to trivia, squad selectors, community features, and gamified rewards programs - reflecting a broader industry shift toward interactive, data-driven engagement as rights holders look to convert passive audiences into identifiable, loyal fans.
Clients include CazeTV in Brazil, where a prediction game with their sponsor iFood is expected to generate record platform traffic, and Minute Media's Sports Illustrated, which is running a full-tournament match predictor covering every stage of the competition on its global digital platform. Additional activations are live with a leading European broadcaster operating a multi-event FanZone with gamification and a rewards shop, and a global payments company deploying wallet-based loyalty and leaderboard campaigns across Latin America.
The FA (Football Association) is using LiveLike to support its World Cup engagement strategy, while one of the largest North American and European sports media groups is using LiveLike’s whole tech stack in various ways across the world (Community, Mini-games, engagement etc…). SBS, Australia's public broadcast service has launched a complete match center experience, combining official World Cup Statistics & engagement widgets.
The scale of deployment reflects a deliberate infrastructure approach. LiveLike's platform is built to absorb the kind of unpredictable, high-volume engagement spikes that define knockout tournament football, where a single goal can trigger millions of simultaneous interactions across dozens of markets.
"The World Cup is the one event where everything has to work everywhere at once. There is no quiet period, no soft launch, no second chance," said Miheer Walavalkar, CEO and Co-Founder of LiveLike. "What we are seeing across these eight activations is proof that our platform does exactly what we built it to do: give every broadcaster, every rights holder, and every platform the tools to turn passive viewers into active fans, at whatever scale the moment demands."
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