November 23, 2021 — Flare announced a partnership with leading esports, gaming and fan engagement enterprise platform Rival to become a preferred NFT, Utility or DAO token platform for Rival’s NFT marketplace.

With the partnership, fans competing on the Rival platform will be able to buy, sell, wrap and engage in new ways on Flare’s canary network Songbird as NFTs. Flare’s Turing-complete smart contracts and low carbon footprint allows fans to gain access to all the benefits of interacting with their favorite teams on the blockchain without the environmental costs associated with traditional consensus solutions.

“Partnering with Flare enables Rival to expand its ecosystem and NFT capabilities for our clients across sports, brands and media,” said Rival CEO Matt Virtue. “This partnership augments the Rival ecosystem and provides additional levers of engagement and community building with one of the fastest growing audience segments in the world.”

Users on the Rival Platform will be rewarded with Flare’s Songbird and FLR token for gameplay and achievements and will have access to Flare and Songbird native Bifrost wallets to seamlessly access their rewards and trade them for ticketing, game passes, NFTs and branded client merchandise.

Based in the U.S. with operations worldwide, Rival is a community builder. The partnership with Flare will expand the platform’s offerings to its clients across its global portfolio of professional sports teams, organizations and media properties.

Hugo Philion, CEO and Co-Founder, Flare: “This partnership is the perfect match because eSports have exploded in the last few years and now most of the major sports organizations in the world are looking for opportunities in gaming which enable them to truly deepen their fan engagement by enabling a myriad of different use cases for user-generated NFTs”.

About Rival

Rival provides a first-of-its-kind, enterprise platform solution that empowers companies and organizations to leverage the popularity of gaming and esports to acquire new customers, drive engagement, build a loyal community around their brands and create new revenue streams. Through its proprietary technology, Rival connects the massive global appeal and audience of gaming and esports with sports teams, leagues, brands and media properties. With operations in two continents, Rival’s current partnership roster includes the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, Monumental Sports and Entertainment, NHL’s Arizona Coyotes, NBA’s Detroit Pistons, Aston Villa and Watford of the English Premier League, as well as organizations including the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and Pop Warner Little Scholars. For media inquiries, please contact media@gorival.com | www.gorival.com.

About Flare

Flare is a scalable, low carbon, low cost, highly decentralized smart contract platform that runs the Ethereum Virtual Machine and utilizes Federated Byzantine Agreement-based consensus. The platform’s native token Spark (FLR) enables Flare to unleash tremendous value in diverse ecosystems and blockchain communities. Flare is unique in that it derives its network structure from its underlying integrated networks, leveraging the decentralisation and security of the underlying networks. Flare’s development team features experts from the worlds of electronic engineering, distributed systems, quantum computing, mathematics, computer science, quantitative finance and risk management.