Tom Mizzone, CEO of Sweet, on NHL Breakaway NFTs and Digital Sports Collectibles | Ep. 291

In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Tom Mizzone, CEO and Founder of Sweet, talks about the NHL’s foray into Web3 and digital collectibles (NHL Breakaway), the future of sports collectibles, and what NHL Breakaway means for hockey fans globally.

About Tom Mizzone

Tom Mizzone is the CEO and Founder of Sweet, a premier platform for gamified digital sports collectible experiences powered by blockchain technology. With over two decades of experience as an entrepreneurial executive, Tom has a proven track record of launching, growing, and operating successful technology organizations. His expertise extends to developing and managing multi-million-dollar services and products for entertainment and media companies, often in close collaboration with some of the world’s most renowned brands. Tom’s vision revolves around the belief that gamified digital collectibles usher in an entirely new category for sports leagues, teams, and athletes, creating an immersive collecting experience that is fan-first, gamified, and deeply social, strengthening the bond between fans and sports. At the heart of this vision is Sweet’s groundbreaking digital collectibles program: NHL Breakaway, the official digital collectibles marketplace of the NHL, NHLPA, and NHLAA, which is centered around iconic highlights from top goal scorers, defensemen, and goalies, revolutionizing how fans experience NHL hockey.

Tom Mizzone gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• The NHL’s foray into Web3 and digital collectibles
• The future of sports collectibles; why digital collectibles will bring Web3 mainstream
• What NHL Breakaway means for hockey fans globally
• The difference between NHL Breakaway and similar platforms (like TopShot)
• Platform features (Trade Lounge, freezing packs, etc)

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We’re buzzing, as always. It’s your host, Matt Zahab, still coming in hot from Mexico. And I am super pumped for today’s episode. Maybe a little more pumped than usual as this one hits very near and dear to my heart. Long term hockey fan, played hockey, I want to say, since age of four or five. And today I get Tom Mizzone on the show, the CEO and Founder of Sweet, to talk about not only Sweet, the premier platform for gamified digital sports collectible experiences, but also NHL Breakaway, which is the National Hockey League’s new NFT platform, which is obviously in conjunction and is built on Sweet, the one and only. Super pumped to have Tom on. He has a proven track record of launching, growing and operating successful tech organizations. Anything gamified, digital collectibles, sports leagues, teams, athletes, you name it. Super pumped. Sweet has also done collectibles programs in NHL, the NHLPA, the NHLAA, and this is going to help grow hockey across the globe and help bring on Web2 hockey users to the Web3 world. Tom, super pumped to have you on. How are you doing?

Tom Mizzone
I’m really well. Great to be here. Thank you so much, Matt.

Matt Zahab
Pumped to have you. Your background is electric. Guys for everyone who’s in their car doing the good old commute, you can’t see Tom’s background, but it is absolutely elite. Definitely cracks the top five for all backgrounds we’ve had. So we’re already off to a great start here. We got to jump right into you before we get into Sweet and of course, NHL Breakaway, as I said during my little brief intro, huge hockey fan. So this one’s a little bit more exciting than usual for me. Crypto’s fun, Blockchain’s incredible, don’t get me wrong. But when you get to tie in my favorite sport on the planet, I got a little more juice. I’m a little more fired up for this one. I want to know a little bit about Tom before we get into it. Walk me through your past, how you got into being a digital collectibles guru and obviously creating organizations that have helped launch these. Walk me through where you grew up. You must have been a sports guy, you must have been an athlete and sort of segue into some of your favorite teams and we’ll loop this all together and then get into some of the fun stuff.

Tom Mizzone
Sure absolutely and great question. So I’m from northern New Jersey. We say New York or the tri state area, but I’m a Jersey boy, coincidentally, a lot of our executive staff based here in New Jersey as well. Grew up a Yankees fan, grew up in the football world, believe it or not, a Redskins fan now Commanders, which was very brutal with a bunch of giants fans at my high school. But back then, thank God, we had some pretty good teams on the hockey side. I’ll say. One of my really good buddies in high school, and I graduated high school in 1989, was a Pittsburgh Penguins fan. And they were very easy to like back then with Mario Lemieux. Yeah. So really kind of grew up liking the Penguins. But in later years, I decided not to torture my kids by liking another sort of out of market team and did flip to the Rangers. And so I’m a Rangers fan now. I’m a big sports guy. I love to collect. I’ve always collected baseball cards. I have a piece of Yankee Stadium from when they tore down the original stadium in a spot.

Matt Zahab
So cool.

Tom Mizzone
My background is building technology. Right. It was 1996. I started my first tech company, believe it or not. The joke a few years ago was like, what’s an NFT? Or what is this technology? I remember the days where it was like, well, what’s a website? Netscape navigator hit. People were browsing these graphical areas on the Internet and everyone’s like, what is this? Right? And so my first company was actually an ISP. You young guys won’t even be able to relate with this, but we had a stack of 14.4k modems that people would dial into from their phones and connect, and then we had a 1.5 megabit T1 pipe connected to that, which would serve like hundreds, even thousands of people access to the Internet. So that’s kind of how I started. Definitely a telecom guy early on, and then I’ve done a few different companies since then, fortunately was very successful with that company and a few others after. I won’t give you all the play by play, but a few years ago, I had this vision for Sweet, seeing the convergence of physical memorabilia moving into digital and the opportunities there. And we’ve been really investing in the last few years into the platform. And as we get into it, you’re going to probably see we’ve taken a little bit of a contrarian or a different approach to the space, right? And I think that set us up in a very different way as we’re now launching, like, lead level programs.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Thanks for the little intro there. Let’s jump right into NHL Breakaway. And before we do, I have a bit of a funny story for you. Back in 2021, very early Feb, end of January, early Feb 2021 NBA Topshot is en route to hitting critical mass and absolute. Just crazy velocity. Obviously big hockey fan. As I mentioned, it is probably the league that I follow the closest and I’ve always been a basketball guy as well. Love all sports. Messed around with some collectibles in NBA Topshot had an absolute blast. Also saw that Sorare was sort of being built out at the time and I was like, you know what, I’m going to bring up some of my sales background here. I’m going to fire off a bunch of cold emails. So I went on to hunter.io and I scraped also my assistant and I scraped, I want to say, about 100 emails from the NHL. And we fired off a bunch of emails. I drafted up a cold email and the title was something along the likes of when are you guys going to jump on the NFT collectible bandwagon? That didn’t work. Then change up a bunch of different titles, changed up the copy, ended up getting response from the whole team. I’m not going to name drop other names because it would be just not the right thing to do for them. But the one big name is Bill Daly. So we had a bunch of conversations with Bill Daly and the whole team and all the other svps and directors at the NHL and they didn’t want to do it. And imagine if they were doing what you guys are doing back two years ago and could have caught on that absolute craziness. That would have been bananas again. You guys are still tearing it up and doing a great job right now, but would have been cool to see. So when this opportunity came on to have you on, I was like, damn, we got to do this.

Tom Mizzone
And just so you know, I think we beat out something like 70 companies to win this deal. Yeah, it was very competitive.

Matt Zahab
The tender was massive. Huge.

Tom Mizzone
Yeah. They brought up a phenomenal consultant company named Shelley Palmer, who was sort of like their technical guru, vetting companies. And one quick funny story. When we finally did win the deal, I have a great relationship with Shelley. He’s a good guy, but yeah, he’s crawling all over us. And when we finally did win the deal, we presented down in DC to all the club presidents that know Gary Batman, everybody was there and Shelly was right next to me and I was Shelly, like, we’re finally on the same is. This is great. And I made a joke to the entire organization there that Shelley had done a colonoscopy level review of our technology. So to the credit of the NHL, sometimes not jumping in on the hype, but really kind of stepping back and saying, what can we learn? How do we do it? Right. We’re advocates for the fans, right. And it doesn’t sort of feel like something that’s not authentic and a little bit of a cash grab. And I think that’s really part of what attracted them to our technology. Right? We’re all about fan first gamification, creating new experiences for hockey fans in a way that’s never been done before. And my gut is if they had just done a knee jerk jump in, they could have some issues right now in terms of how things are structured right. As we’re seeing with some of the other platforms.

Matt Zahab
No, it’s very well said. And the biggest, and one of the parts I’d love for you to discuss on is the IP because that was at least back when I was having the conversations with them two years ago, almost three years ago now. Crazy to think it was really IP related was one of the biggest things. Because if you go on your guys website, well, NHL Breakaway, which obviously is in conjunction with you guys, you’re getting actual game clips owned by the NHL and the NHLPA. This isn’t like, oh, you’re pulling shit from YouTube that isn’t legal and that isn’t copyrighted and trademarked. You’re getting the creme de la creme, the real stuff. And that’s one of the biggest things where it’s like, how do we let the user have access to this NFT? What kind of things can they do with it? Can they profit? Can they not? There’s tons of stipulations. I’d love if you could walk us through some of the conversations that you had with the NHL, the NHLPA, all the directors, the owners of the teams, because they just must have some bananas questions, especially under the assumption that not a whole lot of them fully understand what NFTs are.

Tom Mizzone
Yeah, no, I think that’s right. I think, number one, it starts with the content, right? At the end of the day, content is king. And users want. They want to collect and have in their possession some of the best plays that they’ve either remembered, have a visceral experience at a game with, or just sort of represent the game in a really unique way. And we really went deep on the content and it’s complicated. As you know, there’s lots of parties involved. You got the alumni, you got the PA, you’ve got the league, you’ve got things know, audio in the right, you’ve got plays being called and we had a couple sort of core tenets that we knew we would not launch without Solomon. Number one was having some sort of audio experience. I’ve told this story before. I quickly told again, you may have heard it, but there’s a funny story that George Lucas had told, and I read it in a magazine. The first screening of Star Wars had no background audio. It was just like the narrative script. And it was like crickets in the theater. We all know what happened. The audio came in, did the second screening. People were crying, cheering. And so we knew that without the audio, it would be a very sort of like, mundane and maybe uninspiring experience.

Matt Zahab
Such a good point.

Tom Mizzone
Put in the cycles and to the credit of the right and the PA and the alumni, we really put in the cycles to say, okay, we’re committed to getting a visceral audio experience here. And when you see some of the highlights that we curate and we put into this program, you get angles that you’ve never seen before because we’re kind of pulling all kinds of footage. We’re kind of cutting it up in really creative waves. And the sounds of the gate, the ice, the skates, like your hair stands up on the back of your neck when you see this stuff. Right. And then even going deeper on how we curate. So one of the biggest problems I have in sort of like Web3 or the NFT world is like a false narrative around rarity, right? It’s like, oh, let’s put a willy Wonka collectible or highlight in this particular. I don’t care if it’s a generous series or release, but it’s got no meaning other than the fact that there’s just a few of them. Right? So how do you curate things and make sure that there’s a calibration with the actual meaning to the game, right? So things like really understanding the impact that the moment has or the highlight has. How did it affect the game? How did it affect the series? How did it affect the particular team, right? And making sure that that’s aligned with the rarity. And it’s aligned with kind of like the number that are created. And fans really appreciate that because I have to tell you, nobody knows their sport more than hockey fans. Right? They are just really into it and they know every significance of every play and what it means. And if you can calibrate that well and really kind of like, stick to that narrative of, okay, this is a particular highlight that meant this. And here’s how it should sort of score in the broader ecosystem. That’s a very important part of what we do and what we do with the NHL every single day.

Matt Zahab
I love the point you just brought up, Tom. How the heck do you guys do that? And again, you guys have done an incredible job so far. But what happens when we start going back to some of the crazy highlights, like the team Mussolini breaking the rookie goal record, chucking the glove in the air and shooting it? Or Sid’s first goal, or Gretzky’s point record, or OV’s on the ground behind the back stick goal. How do you decide how many of these are we going to put out? How do you decide what angles to use? Walk me through that workflow behind the scenes with you and the team, the NHL, the NHLPA. How do you guys make it from idea to execution?

Tom Mizzone
Yeah, it’s a great question. And the idea of leveling up every possible aspect of the platform is something that our team is extremely committed to. And content was no different. So we’re going to get into a little bit later how the platform itself is just a completely different approach to collectibles. But if you just stay on the content theme, leveling it up and creating a really powerful, visceral experience takes a lot of operational work. Okay. Number one, it’s with knowledge, right? Who’s better at helping curate and think through sets? We have a phenomenal product team that really know the sport extremely well. And so it starts with, okay, what are things that we want to collect, have our fans collect. How do we put them into thematic sets? How do you match those thematic sets to what the NHL wants to talk about for the next year? Right? What are key events that are happening with the teams? Right? And so all that kind of goes into the sort of the ingredients that we start to mix and then some themes start to emerge. And then from there there’s a very specific and detailed operational workflow that we have with the league where we curate. We pick things that we think are going to be really sought after and interesting from a collector’s perspective, making sure that there’s relevance to the overall sport. It then goes to the NHL. They sort of at a very high level, approve it, then they have to pull the clips. They have to pull all the different angles of those clips. And the league has built a team really just for NHL Breakaway to do that at a very high level. And there’s some back and forth. Right? Sometimes we unfortunately have to throw a play on the floor. It’s like, okay, we can’t use this one. That audio, there’s something in the background, whatever it might be, that we can’t clear. But for the most part, I think we get about 95%, 96% clearance rate on everything that we want. And then it’s like, okay, what are the different angles? How do you highlight the play? How do you show the goal in a way that’s never been seen before? Right? And so then we do the cutting up and then the audio kind of stays in there. Audio is tricky because sometimes it’s multi tracked. If it’s a newer game or a newer play, like in a recent season, there’s different audio channels that we can pull from. No problem. Like, shut that channel off, boost this channel up. Historic stuff. It’s a little bit more complicated right?A lot of thought and detail and hard work goes into that. But we are like a well oiled machine, right? In the ways that we get content selected. NHL sort of approves, comes back. The PA gets involved in that chain. Right? And also the alumni, to the extent there’s a historic player, and then eventually it comes to our production team. And I’m sure you’ve opened some of these packs. The pack itself is an incredible experience. Right? How you open the pack. We came up with this concept of a double reveal. So you don’t just like, yeah, block of ice, and see what you got? No, you break open the block of ice and then you see these cool circulating pucks. And those pucks give you a little hint. This could be something rare. And then you do a reveal of each puck. But then once you do that reveal, even the operational and production work that has gone into that, it opens up like a sandwich. And you see the name of the player, the game that you’re about to see, and then it kind of morphs into the actual play. And so really committed to making that a very important and fun part of the experience. Because ultimately that’s what’s in your wallet, right? That’s what you’re collecting. So a lot of work. Hopefully I’ve given you a little flavor of the amount of work that goes into it.

Matt Zahab
Quick question on the rarity point, because this is something that, again, whenever I’m doing prep for a show, I obviously lurk Twitter. It’s just sort of the HQ of anything crypto related. People are always asking, what’s the algorithm behind the rarity? I guess I’d love to throw that question, throw that ball in your court. And I’m sure you can’t give me the whole sauce, but give me as much as you can. How does the algo for the rarity come to play?

Tom Mizzone
Yeah, that’s a good. And we can just back up for 1 second. I’ll tell you one thing that we are really committed to as a company is not moving the goal post, right. For our collectors and for the NHL fans that have come. You know, as a product guy, I’m a product minded CEO, right? I love real products. The number one thing you do before you launch anything is you talk to the customers, right? You get feedback you want to understand. And you’ll notice we launched with a founding fan cohort, right? A group of passionate users who can help think through and steer and have a sense of ownership of what breakout ultimately was to become. Right? And one of the things that we heard consistently that was a big frustration point was the moving of the goalpost, right? So it’s like, cool. I collected this two years ago. It was a core. And core at that point in time meant this. But because the program got a lot of users or for whatever reason, or maybe somebody got greedy, right. Core now means this. And we are committed. Like we call the covenant with the fans and the covenant with the collectors that you can be assured if you go to our site right now, go to nhlbreakaway.com, scroll down, look at the counts on each rarity tier that that will never be compromised. And that is the number one thing that a fan should know, right.? That you can count on. Core being core. We’re not going to say, hey, now we can mint next year 20,000 core highlights for a given edition. We’re just not getting into that. And that was a very big frustration point that we heard with the users that we talked to that had gotten involved in other programs. So that’s like the macro level, right? As we zoom in now, what we do is we really look at what is the significance of the actual play, right? And where does that slot into that rarity matrix? Okay, so a rare highlight on NHL Breakaway is truly a rare highlight in the significance of the game, right?

Matt Zahab
Doesn’t grow on trees. Yeah.

Tom Mizzone
So that could be someone’s first goal. Right? An epic highlight is an epic milestone. Right? So what is something that a player did that broke a record? Right? And so all that gets calibrated and it’s very important because that’s the integrity of keeping what you’re collecting sort of in alignment with what you remember about the sport. And that’s what I was talking about earlier that I don’t like what I see sometimes. And a lot of this happens, by the way, more in non officially licensed collectibles, right? Where it’s like, cool, let’s make up a cartoon character. Let’s come up with a story, right? Let’s come up with long term narrative. And then we’re going to call these guys rare or we’re going to call these guys epic just because that’s the trait we picked. So we’re not doing that here. An epic highlight on NHL Breakaway is an epic play, right? And it has epic significance in the sport of hockey. And fans really appreciate that. And particularly, like when you get to the actual hockey fan, okay, there’s Web3 collectors. There’s all kinds of people that get into these programs, but the hockey fan really appreciates it because they’re like, yeah, this is what epic should be and this is what it should be. So that’s our philosophy.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Another thing I’d love to get into is the future of NHL Breakaway. The future utility. One of the biggest differences between traditional sports collectibles like cards and the futuristic present day sort of collectibles, digital collectibles, more specifically ones built on the blockchain. The immutability, the potentiality for different types of future utility, which really does move the needle. It makes it very sexy, it makes it just fun. And it allows you to dream, which is very, almost rare and candidly sort of impossible for traditional collectible methods like figures or cards. If you have a Babe Ruth rookie card, sweet, you’re sitting on a couple mil, but you can’t really do a whole lot with it. Maybe you can take out a loan, you can show it off, put it in a museum, but you can’t really do a whole lot. With NHL Breakaway you have incredible clips that can definitely be used for a lot of different things. What do you guys have cooking up right now? And what are you going to allow fans to do in the future for ones they own? Ones they don’t own. What kind of alpha can you give us here, Tom?

Tom Mizzone
The reason I entered this space was really seeing the value that digital can bring to the memorabilia and collectible world. Right? Things like number know. You can argue that it’s easier to track authenticity. We’ve all purchased memorabilia from, I don’t know, Steiner sports or something like that. Comes with a little hologram. Is it the real know? I hope so. I hope somebody did their job right? But the idea that you can use the blockchain to tie prominence back to, okay, this is actually issued by the National Hockey League, right? That’s one and I’ll get into the future stuff. But just to kind of hit on some of the reasons why I’m so passionate about this space storage issues, I mentioned talking to the users before we launched. Another big theme that we heard was, a lot of these other platforms, even in the digital world, don’t give the utility of display, right? They don’t make that an easy thing to do. And the one quote that I remember that stuck with me, one gentleman said, I feel like the things that I own are locked in a digital box in the equivalent of my digital attic. No one knows I own any stuff. And one gentleman said he got an infinite objects frame and put one of his highlights on his desk. And he was like, he was a guidance counselor at a school. And everybody came in and was like, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. What is this? How do I get into it? So leaning into the fact that they’re digital, you could have virtual trophy cases displayed, right? How many calls have we been on where people have loaded their back wall, all their favorite stuff, right? Signed jerseys, memorabilia from the sports world. But you’re limited in real estate, right? And so we’re doing a lot on virtual trophy cases. Virtual display, the ability that you could say, hey, I’m the biggest and baddest collector. I love this team. I love goalies. I love saves. And you can share that with the world, right? That really breaks open the point you were making, some of the limitations that you have with physical collectibles, which is really cool. So we’re a big fan of it. And then the idea that you can kind of create consumer touch points in a much cleaner way, you don’t have to go to the comic book convention, maybe those are fun, right? So I’m not knocking that, but the idea is that we can meet up and we can do a trade, right? So sweets invested in technology that really kind of, I think, pushes the boundaries of what you can do with this stuff. And I’m going to get into specifics with breakaway, but I’ll just back up for 1 second. When this whole world was really hot a few years ago, and it was like Saturday Night lives doing skits on NFTs, right? Do you remember the day you woke up and every single contact you had on LinkedIn was now like a Web3 NFT expert? It’s like, okay, I’ve known that guy for a long time. I didn’t think he was in Web3, he was an NFT guy, right? But that whole wave hit, okay? And everybody was super enthusiastic about it and everybody was building marketplaces. Drops in marketplace drops in marketplace. We said, okay, let’s resist that temptation and let’s invest in technology. That sort of breaks down some of the core fundamental barriers of mass adoption. For example, easy onboarding, a simple wallet. Many people don’t know this, but we launched with Burger King very early on in this world, right? An NFT collection experience on the side of mailboxes, 6 million mailboxes with QR codes gamified, putting completion sets. People were winning like whoppers for a year. Mailbox, scan XQR and get a digital game piece, right? How cool is that? No one thought that could be done. And if you google that, the press was all over it. They’re like, oh, my gosh, here’s a brand finally thinking where this could go, right? Not like, hey, let’s just do a drop for an auction on a marketplace. So that’s where Sweet really kind of, I think, steered right. Whenever we’re steering left, we’re like, let’s invest. Let’s build broad scale technology. How do you engage millions of fans? How do you create incredible campaigns? We did another program with Dave and busters. I don’t know if you know that store. It’s a restaurant arcade where you can literally go to the win counter with your ticket and get a collectible, like a digital collectible. No one thought that could be done either. Right? And so these are the things that I really like about the technology. And frankly, this is what attracted the NHL. The Sweet was that we were saying, okay, how do you engage millions and millions of users into this ecosystem? How do you create really fun experiences? So some of the things you’ll see that we’ve done on breakaway was leaning into the public display. Everyone has a public profile, right? We’ve got some really cool things that are going to be developed around that already in the works. Leaning into a trading system. We launched before the marketplace, we launched the ability to trade with other users. So I can get my Conor McDavid and say, okay, I’m going to put this out on the trading block and I want a very specific highlight back, this specific number that’ll go to a single user. Hey, Matt, you got a trade request. Cool. I got to go in, wake up in the morning, have my bowl of corn checks go through my trades, make decisions, or I can put a broadcast trade up. Hey, I want to try to complete this set or complete this game with an NHL Breakaway. I don’t really care which edition number I get back. I just want to get all the highlights that I need to complete the set that was launched with glowing reviews. I’m going to see if I can find a here’s a tweet. This is very recent too, right? Probably the most fun I’ve had in the space so far. Today was nostalgic, like trading hockey cards at recess stove for NHL Breakaway in the community to be one of the first to complete the space. Let’s talk about the fact that you complete the space set. So these are the things that we like, right? How do you bring users in? Create a better experience for hockey fans, make it social, where they’re connecting with like minded fans and creating ways that they can do more with their collectibles versus holding them in a digital box in their digital wallet. And that’s what we’re all about. And the future is super bright for this space, right? We’re seeing numbers as high as like $50 to $60 billion collectibles market cap by 2032 in just the sports vertical, right? So you’re going to see a big shift from physical to digital and it’s being driven by these types of programs and this type of technology.

Matt Zahab
Well said. It’s no different than really anything else present day. I mean, this world, every single day, every single minute becomes more and more digitally versed. And it’s just part of the process that our old school physical collectibles, like cards and figurines or whatever you want to call it, is now being held online. And like you said, it makes it more fun. Kids nowadays, it’s not like when you and I were at school and we’re slaying hockey cards and playing games in the schoolyard now. Everyone’s little kids are on their phone. They’re playing Fortnite, they’re playing Roblox, right? They’re playing Minecraft. So can’t wait for the future of this. But before we get into the next part here, Tom, we got to give a huge shout out to response to the show PrimeXBT. And when we get back, we are going to keep buzzing on the future of sports collectibles and why digital collectibles will bring Web3 mainstream huge shout out to PrimeXBT, longtime friends and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Podcast. PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style and take advantage of PrimeXBT’s highly reliable market data and performance. PrimeXBT is offering an exclusive promo for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that deposit will be credited to your trading account. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. CRYPTONEWS50. Go check it out. Now back to the show with Tom. Tom, let’s keep buzzing on the future of sports collectibles right now. What do you see the future of this whole scenario looking like? And as sort of a segue into that question, I’d love if you could tie in the sort of big two platforms that are out right now. There’s not a doubt that you guys are going to catch them. But right now you have Topshot, which is the NBA, and you have Sorare, both of them are a little bit different. So rare is more sort of fantasy style where there are only, and this is for European football, soccer for us North Americans. Sorare is fantasy style where there’s only so many Erling Hollands, so many Messi’s, so many Ronaldo’s, so many know player, XYZ, whatever you name it, the better the player, the more expensive it is. And you actually get paid out in ETH every single week. Super cool concept. Then you have NBA Topshot. We all know what NBA Topshot is, and we have now learned what NHL Breakaway is. But how do you see the future of sports collectibles as a whole and how it’s going to help bring the masses into Web3 mainstream?

Tom Mizzone
Yeah, sure. It’s a very big question, right? And I think it starts with some high level fundamentals. And one thing that I’ll say that many of my team members have heard me saying is we have to stop talking in the form of the tech itself. Right? We don’t talk about email like SMTP. We don’t talk about file transfer, FTP. I was never a fan of this big NFT narrative and explosion, right? Not only did you see a lot of companies that were sort of like just trying to jump on the bandwagon with really kind of like a hollow strategy. I made the joke about like half of LinkedIn became NFT and web experts all the time. It’s just the technology, right? And I think there’s also a big confusion point around the way blockchain works. And how that’s sort of like tied to cryptocurrency. We are not a cryptocurrency company. Blockchain technology is just a database technology that allows you, as the consumer, to have a lot of comfort in the fact that what you collected, the providence back to the leads, like, literally issued by the NHL and the PA and the alumni or whoever’s involved. Right? Number two allows you to know that it’s real and authentic. Right? And allows you to really kind of, in a transparent way, understand how many of them are out there in the world. Right? And so blockchain technology is a wonderful technology to sort of usher in the digital collectibles opportunity, particularly in sports. And I think just too many people talk about NFTs. They talk about crypto as it relates to it, or they talk about how are we going to bring more people into Web3. Right? I don’t even like that narrative. I know that might surprise you. Here’s a good example.

Matt Zahab
No, I agree with you there, and that’s on me. It was a poorly framed question, and I apologize for that. I think the better question is, how are we going to get more people to use Web3 tech? And it’s exactly what you and the team are doing, which is Web2 platforms built on Web3 tech. You sign up on NHL Breakaway, you barely even know you’re getting a wallet. Besides the fact that we tell you that it is immutable and that your collectible is transparently present and shown on the blockchain, otherwise, you don’t even friggin know. This is just a beautiful Web2 platform in your eyes. That’s the kind of shit we need.

Tom Mizzone
I wasn’t trying to knock the way you phrased the question. I’m just saying it more holistically. Right? Like, I see some of the coolest, even CEOs and other people saying, like, hey, our platform is ushering in the next wave of consumers into Web3. What about flipping that? What if Web3 was so compelling, right? And the product itself was so interesting and fun for consumers that’s why they were moving in. And it’s not necessarily like, I picture a world where eventually the web is Web3, right? We’re not talking about anymore. And the example I’d like to give is, do you remember a few years ago, AWS went down in a very big way, and excuse me if I get some of these companies wrong, but when AWS went down, Netflix was down, Twitter down. It was like, oh, my gosh, the entire world is powered by AWS. How many people do you know that talked about AWS? Prior to that, it was just sort of powering the infrastructure. That’s where the blockchain needs to get. Web3 has all the things that consumers want, right? But it just needs to be ubiquitous and programs just need to build on it. But ultimately, it’s got to be the consumer experience. If the consumer experience is there, they’re going to stick around and they’re going to have a great time, right? And if the Web3 component is powering it, then all the things that give them comfort, transparency, control of their own data, all that stuff that we all want as consumers will come along for the ride, right? If you will. So anyway, to me, that’s the future. Like this ubiquitous kind of blockchain driven environment.

Matt Zahab
I completely agree with you, and I love the AWS antidote. I would literally bet the whole frigging house and some that if you asked 100 random people in any city, maybe with the exception of San Fran, and you said, hey, do you know what AWS is on the side of the street? I guarantee you 95% of them could not even tell you what it stands for, and it powers 95% of the apps they use. So I love the point you brought up there.

Tom Mizzone
Cool. So I think all of these core tenets of ownership, really, truly having something that is yours, it’s not tied to a platform. You delete your account and all your stuff’s gone, right? Everyone uses, like the Fortnite skin example. My kids have spent an obscene amount of money on Fortnite skins. What happens if you delete the accounts are gone, right? So all that stuff, I think, is super powerful as like a core tenant giving power back to the consumers and their data, not having sort of a big brother company, sort of controlling what they can and cannot have access to. So all that’s got to be there. But our vision is creating deeper consumer experiences. And the other quick point I’ll say is I’ve seen so many companies almost, like, rely too much on the tech, but sort of phone it in on the fundamentals. If it’s not fun, if it’s not sticky, if you don’t want to call your friend and say you need to create an NHL Breakaway account, because it’s just sort of like a niche kind of little program, there’s something like, not happening and you can’t just say, hey, it’s got these core components, therefore you’re going to love it. The reality is consumers love it. Because it’s fun, it’s engaging, it’s social, it’s gamified. They can unlock value, right? All that stuff has to be part of the program. I don’t care how cool the tech is. And I think if we learned anything from Minecraft back in the day, I’ll never forget the first time my kids showed me Minecraft, right? And you can mocked me for this. I was like, this is ridiculous. They’re blocks.

Matt Zahab
I said the same thing. I was like, this is trash.

Tom Mizzone
You’re playing with gigantic pixels this big. They’re blocks. But here’s what Minecraft got right. It was social, it was fun, it was creative, right? And it didn’t matter that your character looked like a blob because they got all the other things right. And that’s what we want to do. We want to get all those things right and create this really fun consumer experience. Leaning into fandom, not leaving out the hockey fan, making sure it’s engaging, doing things like trading, doing things like gifting, doing things like dynamic quests, right, where we can say, we know who you are as a collector. So we’re going to give you a fun challenge that is matched to you versus a one size fits all. Number one, you’re going to get a much higher take rate. Number two, you’re going to be more motivated. Because it’s tied to the things that you like. Number three, the reward that you’re going to get for completion is going to be thematically tied to what you’re into. Right? So that’s the engine that we’ve invested in that makes us very different as a platform. And I think it’s ultimately things like that and it’s thinking like that that will continue to grow like these types of communities.

Matt Zahab
I love that. Tom, you’re on a roll. Unfortunately, we are getting tight for time here. I wish we had more time because I feel like you and I could be buzzing on this for a hot minute. But we will have to have you on for round two very shortly. Just a very quickly conclude, walk me through just a couple of the features on NHL Breakaway, the trade lounge, the freezing packs, I know you discussed those, but anything coming out in the near future that you can drop on the Cryptonews pod before we let you go today?

Tom Mizzone
Yeah, sure. So obviously you’ve seen second completion trade lounge. You’ve seen things like gifting, you’ve seen broadcast trades, pinpoint trades, or like addition for addition trades. I’ll tell you the next big thing. That’s imminent is the marketplace, which you’re going to find really interesting. So that’s coming very soon for fence. So the ability for the first time to sell, to keep a balance within the ecosystem that can be used across the ecosystem. And then you’re going to see a lot more details coming out on all those core features over the next like call it 30 to 60 days. So lots coming. I wish I could share more, but I think you’re going to find it extremely compelling when it launches.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Tom, thanks again for coming on. Before you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you? NHL Breakaway and Sweet online and on socials.

Tom Mizzone
Sure. So Sweet is just sweet.io and you’ll see all the social links on the bottom. Most of them are @sweet. Then we’ve got nhlbreakaway.com, which is the main sort of entry point into the NHL system. It’s a common login, by the way. So the Sweet account spans all the ecosystems that we power and then all the socials are on the bottom there as well. We’ve got discord, very vibrant community. Love our founding fans and the community on Discord give us so much valuable information. Super passionate, but yeah, we’d love for you guys to jump in and see what this is all about.

Matt Zahab
Love it. Folks what an episode with Tom Mizzone, CEO and Founder of Sweets, also powering the one and only NHL Breakaway. As always, I will include all the links and show notes in the Podcast platforms. All Podcast platforms. If you guys enjoyed this one, I hope you did. Please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I speaking to the team. Love you guys. Thank you so much for everything. Justas my amazing sound editor, you are the man. And back to the listeners. Love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk sooner.