FC Barcelona’s Barca Vision Receives €120M Web3 Investment

FC Barcelona has received a €120 million ($132 million) investment for its Web3 initiative, Barca Vision, from Libero Football Finance AG and Nipa Capital B.V, FC Barcelona reportedly sold a 29.5% stake in Bridgeburg Invest, the holding company for Barca Vision, in exchange for capital on August 11.

Developers wrote, “Barca Vision is the Club’s initiative to integrate all digital content around Web3 and blockchain, including nonfungible tokens (NFTs) and the metaverse, as part of the Club’s strategy to construct the digital Espai Barca.”

Libero is a publicly traded German company that advises football organizations on financial matters. The Dutch venture capital firm Nipa Capital is headquartered in the Netherlands.

The transaction is contingent on FC Barcelona shareholder approval and is anticipated to conclude in the fourth quarter of 2023.

Since February 2020, FC Barcelona has collaborated with the Chiliz blockchain to develop BAR fan tokens based on Ethereum for its sports franchise.

Chiliz announced in August 2022 that it had acquired a 24.5 percent stake in FC Barcelona’s digital content creation arm, Barca Vision, for $100 million.

In May, FC Barcelona and Plastiks released their first NFT collection. “Unleash Your Passion” is a collection of 3,000 animal-themed NFTs priced at $30 each that, according to the club, will help “remove 35,000,000 kilograms of plastic from our planet.”

In July 2022, the football club sold its first NFT “Masterpiece #1 In a way” for $693,000 at a Sotheby’s auction in New York. Masterpiece #2 Empowerment, the second collectible in the series, was sold on OpenSea for $300,231 on June 28, 2023.