The NCAA’s new regulations concerning the monetization of college athletes’ name, image, and likeness (NIL) shook the collegiate sports world to the core. Athletes were finally able to profit from their hard work and dedication, allowing them to better fund their future endeavors as both players and professionals. However, the NIL deals that have sprung out of this change in regulation have been cumbersome, time-consuming, and often exclusive to only renowned athletes in popular sports such as basketball or football. As a result, most athletes make very little from their NIL, and the ones that make more have to put in extra time at a deluge of photoshoots, events, and meetings.

NextName is here to fix this issue. As a platform with national aspirations, we seek to fundamentally alter the NIL landscape by making its profitability easy and effective for the athletes as well as the fans. Our community-based model allows fans to easily support athletes by purchasing digital collectibles bearing their NIL where 60% of the proceeds get paid directly to the players. Digital collectibles, or Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), provide a simple and easy solution for the brand development of all athletes regardless of their or their sports’ popularity, and allow fans to support their favorite teams and players with only a few swipes on their phone.  As passionate college sports fans ourselves, we believe our crowdsourced model for NIL monetization will better engage fans in addition to providing a little-to-no-effort avenue for athletes to profit off their dedication to the sport.