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The Sorare NFT soccer trading card game has partnered with the Premier League on a multi-year licensing agreement.

Sorare

Sorare, the $4.3 billion fantasy soccer game, has signed a multi-year deal with the Premier League that will see the world’s top soccer league license official player cards.

Players of the game will be able to purchase and use official Premier League-licensed NFTs under the exclusive multi-year agreement.

Paris-based startup Sorare, which has 3 million users worldwide, lets people compete in fantasy soccer games of five a side. The chances of success are based on the real-time performance of players on the pitch.

Sorare said it’s also launching two new features in the game. These include the ability to compete with league-specific player cards and a “financial fair play” feature that prevents users from selecting all-star teams.

Sorare was first rumored to be in talks with the Premier League — the top tier of England’s men’s soccer leagues — about a licensing agreement in Oct. 2022. Sorare CEO Nicolas Julia said things took longer to wrap up than anticipated as the Premier League had an existing NFT licensing deal with another firm.

Sky News reported earlier that the deal was worth £30 million. Julia declined to share specifics on the financial terms and length of the deal.

The news comes despite a sharp slump in NFT trading activity.

Values of NFTs — or non-fungible tokens — have plummeted amid a downturn in crypto prices known as the “crypto winter,” exacerbated in recent months by the bankruptcy of major exchange FTX.

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According to data site CryptoSlam, the average selling price of an NFT in Dec. 2022 was $143.22, down 63% from $383.73 in Dec. 2021.

Trading volumes are also down significantly. Overall NFT sales plunged 78% in December to $678.2 million from $3.1 billion a year ago.

Julia said Sorare has “trended very differently from the rest of the space.” Total exchanges of cards on the platform amounted to $500 million last year, almost doubling from $270 million in 2021.

Still, the company has noticed a shift in usage with players more inclined to use its “free-to-play” mode where they don’t have to compete with paid-for cards.

Some 87% of Sorare players “don’t even spend money on the platform,” Julia said.

That’s raised an obvious question about the sustainability of Sorare’s model: how does it make money when most of its users aren’t transacting?

For his part, Julia said the big-spending power users were enough to anchor income generation. Sorare takes an unspecified cut of all transactions via its service.

It’s worth noting Sorare is the third-biggest NFT collection worldwide, according to CryptoSlam data. The firm processes roughly $1 million of transactions in a 24-hour period, CryptoSlam’s figures show.

The Premier League’s partnership with Sorare adds to a slew of deals between sports leagues and crypto platforms.

Sorare itself has previously announced deals with Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association.

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Some agreements, like Crypto.com’s deal for the naming rights to the Staples Center arena in Los Angeles and FTX’s now-defunct sponsorship of the Miami-Dade Arena, have soured amid the plunge in crypto prices.

Julia said Sorare was sheltered from the fallout of the crash on crypto-focused sports advertising as his firm focuses on licensing of intellectual property rather than sponsorships.

The French startup was last valued by investors at $4.3 billion in September 2021. Sorare is backed by top names including Japan’s SoftBank and venture capital firms Accel and Benchmark. It also counts sports stars Lionel Messi, Serena Williams and Kylian Mbappe as shareholders.

Sorare has not been without its controversies and has come under fire over accusations that it encourages gambling.

The U.K. Gambling Commission is investigating the firm “to establish whether Sorare.com requires an operating license or whether the services it provides do not constitute gambling,” according to an Oct. 8, 2021 notice.

Julia said he was unable to provide an update yet on the process of the U.K. inquiry.

In November, the startup committed to making some changes to its platform after action taken by the French National Gambling Authority. Those included strengthening the free-to-play elements of the game. The company is required to enforce these measures by Mar. 31.

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OpenAI says it will use Google’s cloud for ChatGPT

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OpenAI says it will use Google's cloud for ChatGPT

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks to members of the media as he arrives at a lodge for the Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference on July 8, 2025 in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images

OpenAI said Wednesday that it expects to use Google’s cloud infrastructure for its popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence assistant.

The reach for additional capacity aligns with OpenAI’s desire for more computing power to meet heavy demand after initially relying exclusively on Microsoft for cloud capacity. The two companies’ relations have evolved since then, with Microsoft naming OpenAI as a competitor last year.

Both companies sell AI tools for developers and offer subscriptions to companies.

OpenAI has added Google to a list of suppliers, specifying that ChatGPT and its application programming interface will use the Google Cloud Platform, as well as Microsoft, CoreWeave and Oracle.

The announcement amounts to a win for Google, whose cloud unit is younger and smaller than Amazon‘s and Microsoft‘s. Google also has cloud business with Anthropic, which was established by former OpenAI executives.

The Google infrastructure will run in the U.S., Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom.

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Last year, Oracle announced that it was partnering with Microsoft and OpenAl “to extend the Microsoft Azure Al platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure” to give OpenAI additional computing power. In March, OpenAI committed to a cloud agreement with CoreWeave in a five-year deal worth nearly $12 billion.

Microsoft said in January that it had agreed to move to a model of providing the right of first refusal anytime OpenAI needs more computing resources, rather than being its exclusive vendor across the board. Microsoft continues to hold the exclusive on OpenAI’s programming interfaces.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in April that the startup, which draws on Nvidia graphics processing units to power its large language models, was facing capacity constraints.

“if anyone has GPU capacity in 100k chunks we can get asap please call!” he wrote in an X post at the time.

Reuters reported in June that OpenAI was planning to bring on cloud capacity from Google.

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Tesla’s change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials

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Tesla's change in bylaws to limit shareholder lawsuits slammed by New York state officials

Elon Musk interviews on CNBC from the Tesla Headquarters in Texas.

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In May, Tesla changed its corporate bylaws in a way that would require investors to own 3% of the stock, today worth about $30 billion, in order to file a derivative lawsuit against the company for breach of fiduciary duties. Authorities in New York State are now asking Tesla to delete the bylaw entirely.

Overseers of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, which owns about 0.1% of Tesla’s shares, submitted a formal proxy proposal and letter to the company on July 11, and shared it with CNBC on Wednesday. They say that Elon Musk’s automaker engaged in a “bait-and-switch” to convince shareholders to approve an incorporation move from Delaware to Texas in June 2024.

Musk made the move after a judge in Delaware voided the $56 billion pay package that the CEO, also the world’s richest person, was granted by Tesla in 2018, the largest compensation plan in public company history. In getting shareholders to approve the change in its state of incorporation, Tesla said that stakeholders’ rights “are substantially equivalent” under the laws of Delaware and Texas.

On May 14, almost a year after Tesla’s move, Texas changed its law to allow corporations in the state to require 3% ownership before being able to carry forth a shareholder derivative suit.

“The very next day, Tesla’s board amended the Company’s bylaws to the maximum allowable 3% ownership threshold, effectively insulating the Company’s directors and officers from accountability to shareholders,” the New York letter says. The letter was signed by Gianna McCarthy, a director of corporate governance with the retirement fund, on behalf of the fund and New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

Only three institutions currently own at least 3% of Tesla’s outstanding shares.

Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The New York fund overseers wrote that derivative actions are “the last resort for shareholders to enforce their rights” when company directors or officers violate their fiduciary obligations, and called Tesla’s decision on the matter “egregious.”

In an email to CNBC, DiNapoli said Tesla “deceived shareholders” in assuring them that their rights would remain the same in Texas.

“These actions violate basic tenets of good corporate governance and must be reversed,” he wrote.

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee’s ether company and the shares are surging

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Peter Thiel just bought a big stake in Tom Lee's ether company and the shares are surging

Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022. 

Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images

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The current wave of interest in Ethereum and related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, and a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s wildly successful IPO and ongoing progress in Congress on the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.

The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.

Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.

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