NFT “Project Max” featuring a photo of athletes from Bar Kochba Berlin, a first-of-its-kind sports club … [+] founded in Germany in the early 1900s.
On a recent morning, Eran Reshef toured an archive that will be on display at the soon-to-open Maccabi Museum on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. As he moved through hundreds of medals, trophies, badges, flags, pictures, films, and memorabilia from more than a century of sports competition, the Israeli entrepreneur kept thinking about how the past and the present -move the present time into the future. Inspired by his observation of the artifacts and trying to find ways for technology to create connections between the younger generations of people on social networks and in the metaverse, “Project Max” was born.
Project Max is an initiative that uses non-funded tokens as a way to reach out to the community. The NFTs are officially licensed digital memorabilia generated from Maccabi’s physical archives. But they do more than just the latest attempt by an established organization to tap into the recent popularity of NFTs among collectors, investors and speculators. Instead, they aim to bring people closer together through meaningful messages about sport and society.
The project is a global awareness effort focused on promoting inspiring stories that connect with people through social media and the metaverse. He uses Maccabi’s store of sports memorabilia as the basis for NFTs that promote the message.
Maccabi is recognizable to many sports fans by its association with major league professional teams in Israel that compete on the international stage. Named teams regularly play in men’s football in UEFA Champions League competitions and men’s basketball teams have won EuroLeague championships. And, for the past ninety years, the name has been known to male and female athletes taking part in the Maccabiah Quadrennial Games; the twenty-first edition of the Games took place last month, and around 10,000 athletes from more than 60 nations competed in 3,000 events across 42 sports at venues in 18 cities across Israel.
Maccabi organizations have played an important role in their communities around the world since the end of the 19th Century. The roots of the movement lie in a call by the Hungarian-French doctor and author Max Nordau for an athletic, physical and spiritual discipline that could revive a nation of Jews. Today, the network of 450,000 members across 450 clubs in 80 countries organized under the Maccabi World Union. In recent years, however, there has been a sense among their leadership that younger people are becoming disengaged and separated from their heritage and identity. At the same time, anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred and intolerance are raging, especially online.
Rising levels of disengagement among people in a community and increasing levels of hate speech online are often treated as separate challenges. But Reshef, the serial entrepreneur, sees that they are interconnected. So, too, does Maccabi World Union executive Amir Gissin. Discussing that point after Reshef’s visit to the Maccabi Museum gave them an understanding to approach things from a new perspective. As Reshef explained to me, the development of Project Max and its NFTs arose from that sensibility, along with inspiration from Nordau’s name and vision.
One of the NFTs, for example, draws on a photograph of athletes traveling to the first Maccabiah Games in 1932 as an opening to tell the story of a journey that saved many lives because of what it did to guide them to escape the Nazi threat growing across Europe. A trophy from Maccabi clubs such as HaKoach Vienna, which won the Austrian national football championship in the 1920s, is a gateway to sharing stories from pre-war football culture and the coffee house to the club’s wrestling team acting as security guards for teams in other sports with players emigrating and forming big teams outside of Europe until the liquidation of the club by the Nazis and the death of many members during the Holocaust. A lapel pin or medal from clubs such as Bar Kochba Berlin, HaGibbor Prague, Maccabi Warsaw, Maccabi Bulgaria, or Maccabi Syria & Lebanon provides entry to stories of growth and change in those communities over time.
However, the NFTs might have leaned more towards novelty than utility if not for the technology Reshef had in mind while touring the Maccabi archives.
“Project Max” NFT with a photo of Austrian athletes on a train taking the first Maccabiah Games … [+] in 1932. The trip saved many of their lives by encouraging them to escape later from the growing Nazi threat on across Europe.
Reshef is a co-founder of Israeli startup Sighteer, along with veteran startup entrepreneurs Roni Reshef and Asher Polani. The company, a pioneer in social marketing, has developed an artificial intelligence platform that can reach specific audiences with relevant messages at scale. The way Reshef figured it out, he said, was that Sighteer technology could be used to build the bridges that bring Maccabi’s stories to the right audience on social media and in the metro.
The Sighteer AI is not involved in public relations, media messaging, or marketing. What it does, as Polani explained, is “discover the identities and relationships that shape a community” and then help increase the community’s global influence. With the Sighteer AI, NFT is much more than a tradable token – it is a key to how to run an effective and efficient community in the Web 3.0 world.
That is why Project Max, according to its design, weaves together three pillars that reflect and reflect the power of sport in society. One is the values inherent in sports – winning and losing, competition, determination, persistence, individual and team work, and so on. Another is the role of sports and its values as a driver of social movements. The third part is to gather the community of people from all generations and parts of the world around sports.
In that way, Project Max is an example of something more than just whipping up and selling digital versions of historical artifacts housed in museum display cases. And it’s about more than just the latest example of an organization using NFTs as a way to reach out to the public. Rather, it represents a new way of thinking about using the power of sport to attract people to identify more closely with their communities.
