January 25th, 2022 - The Algorand Foundation welcomes RALLY to the Algorand ecosystem as our latest grant recipient. RALLY has been awarded a Algorand grant to support the development of an NFT marketplace, and community, focused on endurance athletes.
Building on Algorand will enable RALLY to convert years of data into an entirely new form of value and create a new basis for support and collaboration that is unique to the endurance athlete community and audience. This is a group that accomplishes remarkable things that can be digitized and monetized as NFTs. Athletic data, competitions, training logs, and hairy adventures are an entirely new frontier in the arena of content.
The societal benefits of endurance exercise are significantly undervalued. At RALLY we are committed to using the dynamics of blockchain to rectify this situation.
As a move-to-earn game for endurance athletes, RALLY adds a virtual layer over the physical spaces athletes train in. Players simply make an account and link their IoT devices during their normal outing to roam the RALLY map. Once there, they earn RALLYcoin and discover items with randomized rarity features. They can also build and set challenges with a variety of prize options for other users. The result is more fun, more value, and more connection for runners, cyclists, and triathletes all through a blockchain economy run on sweat.
Through RALLY the Algorand grant will be used to build new ways for blockchain to facilitate socially and economically impactful community interactions. In existing digital communities, users and creators have to partner with third parties and funnel supporters off-platform to draw value from their work. The current compensation model for athletes is likewise limited by complications and barriers. RALLY consolidates the monetization process of social support and fitness into one tool and empowers users to take charge of all of it. For example, players will be able to “stake” fellow athletes just as one might typically “follow” users, allowing both participants to profit from the benefits of staked loot.
In the early days of defining the RALLY mission and vision, Algorand quickly emerged as our top choice for protocols. The project is pushing societal limits to define, quantify, and increase the value of activities currently seen as self-centered and self-serving. To do so, we need to operate on thin margins with a blockchain-wary audience. The reliability, predictably-low fee structure, and speed of the Algorand chain make that possible by making it easier to employ blockchain functions seamlessly in the background. In short, we are well equipped to put the user experience and value add first. No other chain can do that as reliably as Algorand.
“The Algorand Foundation values the importance of NFT marketplaces and this is evident through the grant funding provided to numerous NFT projects who are building on Algorand. We are excited to now welcome RALLY as the latest grantee to join the ever-growing NFT ecosystem being built on the Algorand network”. - Addie Wagenknecht, Head of Global Ecosystems and Technical Operations
For more information on Rally, please visit their website or follow them on Twitter or join them on Discord.
If you are interested in submitting a project for support from the Algorand Foundation Grant program, please apply here.
