An Australian flies to Germany, meets a Frenchman, and hands over $US100,000 ($137,000). It’s not a new Netflix trailer, but the untold story of Chris Hitchen’s seed investment in Sorare, a start-up that has risen 220,000 per cent in only 28 months.

Sorare, which looks Italian but is pronounced “so rare”, is a French start-up focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These NFTs act like electronic soccer star trading cards and sit on the blockchain so ownership can be easily verified.