Golf startup putts $10.5 million in NFT sales

Par for the course: The LinksDAO golfing startup could drive DAO adoption at the country club.

No sector of the economy or indeed life is safe from nonfungible tokens (NFTs) or tokenization. Golf is the latest sport to succumb to the lure of NFTs and a round of decentralization thanks to the efforts of LinksDAO. 

In a sold-out NFT drop, LinksDAO raised $10.5 million to fund its golfing aspirations. More than 9,000 “leisure membership” and “global membership” NFTs were purchased on the OpenSea platform, exchanged for Ether (ETH).

It would seem that while 2021 was a thriving year of decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) activity, with some treasuries surging in value by 40x, golf is also now driving crypto adoption.

However, as opposed to pictures of bored apes or raising funds for presidential campaigns, the LinksDAO NFTs contribute to the running of a DAO, which would “improve transparency around certain aspects of organizational governance of the club’s business.”

Consequently, the LinksDAO NFTs are not membership cards to the golf clubs; they are the keys to community access, governance, and “a wide variety of perks.” The NFTs will eventually unlock membership to LinksDAO’s first golf and leisure club.

As expected, the NFT sale is merely the newly formed startup’s means of teeing off. High on the priority list of LinksDAO’s business plan is to “identify a list of golf courses for acquisition” and develop a $LINKS cryptocurrency token. These plans should come together in mid-2022.

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The group is led by Mike Dudas, a familiar figure in crypto as founder and CEO of The Block. A vocal anti-Bitcoin (BTC) maximalist, he reached the #83 spot on Cointelegraph’s Top 100 most influential people in crypto in 2020. His Twitter has taken on the apt “Mike DAOdas” handle, and he is associated with The Block, 6th Man Ventures a crypto VC, as well as Paxos and Venmo.

Despite general market exuberance for DAOs, some golf fans and NFT collectors were left scratching their heads regarding Dudas’ route to starting a golfing company by creating a DAO.

Dudas clarified in a Tweet that the LinksDAO NFT “does *not* give ownership of the asset, but it gives governance rights over the process of club design and the ability to purchase membership at the club once open.”