Paris A Crypto Hub? Macron's Dream May Be a Gamble
Paris is offering shelter from crypto winter. The City of Lights has welcomed Binance and more recently Crypto.com (of Matt Damon cringe fame) with regulatory licenses; an “NFT Factory” showcasing digital artworks has also opened its doors opposite the Centre Pompidou.
President Emmanuel Macron's administration sees an advantage in luring tech talent and investment, while France's culture and entertainment champions have felt pressure to dabble in meta-collectibles in a Silicon-Valley-dominated world — even as enthusiasm has dimmed somewhat.
But hopes for a French “exception” to the wider crypto market wreckage are running into the need for tougher rules.
Case in point is Sorare, the NFT-based fantasy-football game that was valued at $4.3 billion last year in a funding round led by SoftBank. It's been an undeniable success, in the Top 20 NFT collections by all-time sales volume, according to CryptoSlam data, even if average prices appear to have cooled. Like regular sports cards, there is a collectible appeal; and like fantasy football, there's a game involved, where performance scores points.
Yet the risky speculative appeal has become impossible to ignore as cards can be bought and sold using cryptocurrency, spawning hype-fueled tales of players taking out loans or quitting their jobs to win big, and as the best prizes and Ethereum rewards are on offer to rarer, pricier cards. “What we have with the likes of Sorare is a blurring of the lines, deliberately, between gaming and gambling,” says Kieran Maguire, author of The Price of Football.
And now regulators keen to clean up crypto are looking at Sorare. These are not the financial-market watchdogs seen in the US, where Bloomberg News reports the Securities and
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