A new beginning

A little over a month after the presentation of EXPlus, the first Italian NFT sports community, many pieces of digital art, memorabilia of champions and the highly anticipated ATP Finals Experience with Flavia Pennetta have been assigned by auction or by draw to a public of enthusiasts who are approaching the innovative use that ExPlus offers through its NFTs.

Moreover, the EXPlus offer is potential and changeable by nature: from NFT Art to NFT Memorabilia, passing through NFT Experiences that allow community members to get close, virtually and physically, to some of the greatest names in Italian sport.

For example, last month a first contest on Discord allowed the winner to choose between 4 unique NFTs such as the signed shoes of Gigi Datome, the glove of Daniele Garozzo, the swimming cap of Gregorio Paltrinieri or the Perugia Volley shirt signed by Simone Giannelli. And the World Champion, captain of the Italian national volleyball team, was also the protagonist of the first competition on Premint, which awarded his Asics shoes worn in the final of the 2021 European Volleyball Championship.

In November, however, it was Tania Cagnotto who joined the EXPlus community, diving into the world of NFTs with many of her memorabilia and experiences for those who will have the honor of meeting a timeless legend of Italian Olympic sport on the springboard.

And Tania will be an EXPlus icon like Flavia Pennetta, who through her unique NFT, a digital artwork by Giuseppe Stampone, allowed the buyer of a very popular auction to attend a match with her at the Nitto ATP Finals in Turin: two VIP seats with reserved parking and access to the hospitality area with a Michelin starred dinner. Sitting in the front row watching two of the best eight players in the World and accessing the secrets of elegant tennis of Flavia, champion of the US Open 2015, the doubles title of the 2010 Finals and the 2011 Australian Open with Gisela Dulko; career winner of the Indian Wells and 4 Fed Cups in the golden years of Italian women’s tennis of Francesca Schiavone, Roberta Vinci and Sara Errani.

To talk about EXPlus we met the Founder & Chairman Gabriele Vedani – creator of successful start-ups such as TheBestEquity and Oxabyo in recent years – and the Founder & CEO Lorenzo Marconi, High Performance Coach of Italian Olympic and emerging athletes.

I think that EXPlus is a fantastic project and if before I said it out of passion, with my heart and with my belly, today I shout it out of my head, launching an audience of sports enthusiasts and potential customers onto a new playing field, with rules so different but at the same time simple. We do this by developing new business lines and new technological partnerships, perceiving every possible opportunity to express a winning project. To connect a virtual world, and up to now highly speculative, to a concrete value proposition and original content
Gabriele Vedani

The strength of our project was also a weakness of the first hour: providing NFT content to a market that is not ready to receive a virtual product, because it still doesn’t know it or distrusts it today. So, our challenge is to combine technology and content. However, we have entered a decisive phase in which a market that has been hyper-speculative for many years needs to “understand” in order to return to investing
Lorenzo Marconi

Serial entrepreneurs, Gabriele Vedani and Lorenzo Marconi met a long time ago on the financial markets and never leave each other, already co-authors of Passion4: a Sport Talent Support project at the service of the youngest and emerging Italian athletes in need of human resources, technical teachings and economic supports.

Today sport is also at the nerve center of EXPlus:

We bring to EXPlus our previous lives and a long experience of a few medals and many scars, who have come here from the world of finance to translate it into our sporting passion
Lorenzo Marconi

Yes, EXPlus is our latest challenge about “Thinking outside the box”, from the ethical and sporting patronage of Passion 4, to the almost pathological love we feel for “creative” work, trying to ground our ideas and why no, our fantasies. And why not tokenize talented young athletes in the future who, as in the case of Passion 4, need to sow technical resources and raise economic capital to grow?
Gabriele Vedani

While virtual reality or augmented reality have been part of our lives for a decade now, there is a future towards the Web3 that reveals itself as beautiful and becomes understandable by inhabiting it. A future that EXPlus wants to be part of by combining tools: growing at the service of its suppliers, who are celebrity athletes, according to its consumers and customers, who are User Experiences:

I think that EXPlus at the moment is a wonderful laboratory of professionals who –
sometimes different from each other in terms of training and approaches, therefore equally valuable – share and develop the same values. We are on a market that has enormous potential without yet “existing”, so we feel ready to feed a new audience equipped with e-wallets (virtual wallet now owned by a few but destined to enter the everyday life of the masses) with content that is added and real values, such as watching an ATP Finals match with Flavia Pennetta, playing basketball on the playground with Datome, swimming alongside Paltrinieri. Furthermore, thanks to the memorabilia of our testimonials, we have a certification of origin, we certify all the steps as notaries of 3.0 for an Order Driven market that is as transparent as possible, made up of supply and demand as a primary rule
Gabriele Vedani

In the next episode

Unlike music, sport is still a little colder towards technology, despite the fact that it is becoming an increasingly necessary support tool. Art and sport together, however, give an emotion and our emotions are technological contents to be experienced in more or less syncopated times towards an interpreted and finished result
Lorenzo Marconi

Yes, we are also fighting against today’s cultural involution and against those who do not believe in sporting beauty, in the art of sport, such as a tennis match played at the Foro Italico among the Marbles, for example. Then that beauty is digitally declined, why not, our NFT Art express a beauty that is not objective, but certainly subject to judgment and recognized as a piece of art
Gabriele Vedani