It is unlikely that you have heard of the Juventus Fan Token, right?
Presumably, you have heard of Bitcoin and Blockchain before though.
That is not surprising. During the first quarter of 2021, Bitcoin is in the headlines once again. Welcome to the bull market.
You might ask yourself, what does all of this have to do with Sports and the sports industry?
Allow us to explain, Dejavu is of the opinion that we are currently also very much on the brink of a digital sports revolution, which is now moving ahead faster than expected due to COVID-19 outbreak.
An era in digital fan engagement
What do we expect to happen next?
In this year 2021, we anticipate a sports and e-sports landscape that is not only shaped by the games, teams and leagues that draw the highest audiences, but also by those which can most effectively activate and monetise those audiences by putting their fan-base in the driving seat. This process is called radical fan engagement:
Radical fan engagement is a universal sports and e-sports ‘fan-control’ engine that gives the fans voting rights to guide their favourite teams’ management and steer strategy decisions. The hypothesis is an ecosystem in which any team and any game is steered with blockchain technology.
The overall objective is to turn the world’s billions of sports, e-sports and gaming fans from mere spectators into influencers.
Use-Case: Tokenization
The company Socios are partnering with canow co. ltd. to on-board Japanese and South-East Asian sporting organisations – and their fans – onto Socios’s innovative tokenised fan engagement platform.
Acting as Socios’s digital marketing partner in the region, canow will work on behalf of the platform to connect Socios to the best potential sports clubs around Japan and South-East Asia.
Socios is a blockchain based fan engagement and rewards platform that partners with sports organisations to give their global fanbase a “voice” within the teams they love, recognition of their fandom from the teams and the ability to leverage their engagement for rewards.
All these engagements and interactions are made possible via club-specific Fan Tokens, which Socios creates for partners and makes available for the fans to purchase. Tokyo, Japan, Dec. 16, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)
What is a Fan Token?
The growing list of Socios’s partners already includes the likes of Juventus, FC Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, Atlético Madrid, and many more.
Fan Tokens are a digital asset class specific to each of Socios’s partners, whose ownership allows fans to vote on club decisions, while their ownership makes fans eligible to receive unique rewards in exchange for their engagement, i.e. redeem club-exclusive rewards such as ticketing raffles, cashback on official merchandise, photo contests, quizzes and more.
For these football clubs, fan tokens open up a new revenue vertical, while fans get a tradable share of influence and connection to the clubs they love; everybody wins.
Crypto complexity for mainstream users
While offering many advantages, the Blockchain use for collectibles also has some drawbacks in terms of end-user sophistication.
Networks typically require the user to deploy two different types of tokens. One is to buy Ethereum (ETH) or another cryptocurrency, which is then used as an “on-chain” payment to buy the item the user really wants – in our case the collectible token or tokenised in-game item.
In essence, while ETH works like an in-game currency, the poor user experience creates a barrier to adaptability, which needs to be addressed.
Requiring to have a separate cryptocurrency wallet, an exchange account, and the need to jump through Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, creates far too much friction for someone who just wants to buy a collectible card.
The Solution
The solution would be to have an embedded wallet, meaning the wallet is now an integral part. There is no need to go to a cryptocurrency wallet. Instead, the payment is made from the platform’s website and KYC is done “invisibly”.
To provide more flexibility, you could give users the option to pay for US dollar stablecoin USDC (used for in-game blockchain payments) through credit and debit cards instead, which would avoid the need for potential users to understand cryptocurrency payments in detail.
Conclusion
This is only a brief look into the developments that have been happening so far and are about to really kickstart.
We are very excited about the projects that will grow exponentially over the next few years as technology is advancing further and further.
This digital sports revolution is here to stay and will soon become the normality in how fans and sports clubs engage with each other.
Take our word for it!