What is a sports fan's dream come true? Being the announcer for an AC Milan home game, in front of 75,000 Rossoneri fans?
Play a soccer match on the hallowed grass of your beloved FC Barcelona?
Touring an F1 team's garage before the race and then watching the Monza Grand Prix from a VIP box?
Here are some of the biggest rewards given out as incentives for joining the Chiliz or CHZ based fan token schemes on Socios.com. There are also smaller, but still desirable prizes, like meeting your sports idols, choosing the music that will play when your team scores a goal, or voting on the jersey design for next year's team.
Socios.com has now partnered with over 170 sports clubs in 25 countries and 10 sports, including American Football, Soccer, Basketball, Cricket, Esports, Ice Hockey, Mixed Martial Arts, Motorsports, Tennis, and Rugby. . Eighty of these organizations have already launched their official fan tokens on the Socios.com app, and it has high-profile deals with giants, including Manchester City, Barcelona, and the Aston Martin F1 Team.
The team captain behind it is Socios CEO Alex Dreyfus. “I am French, right now I am 45 years old. And I've been an internet entrepreneur for the last 25 years. i left school early [I was] 18 years. I created my first company in 1995 at the beginning of the Internet. I am the generation of Web 1.0. So for the last 25 years, my journey has always been about trying to use technology to create something that doesn't exist and trying to accept it before anyone else."
He started by developing a guide to French cities that covered first Paris and then 36 other French cities. A serial entrepreneur, he moved on to an online gaming project, with sports betting and online poker. While there are fewer regulations in France, unlike the UK, there are not bookmakers everywhere. He moved to Malta 17 years ago and, 10 years ago, cashed out his betting companies to raise capital for his next project.
Interestingly, he started out as a Bitcoin skeptic. Coming from the highly regulated world of online gambling, he had a hard time thinking of a decentralized system without an oversight body.
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Bitcoin Skeptical… At First
In Iceland during his honeymoon, Dreyfus came across a store that accepted Bitcoin, which triggered something in the back of his mind. When he got home, he discovered that the gaming space was full of cryptocurrency enthusiasts making money. “I saw my Twitter feeds: all my friends were trading cryptocurrency, talking about it.”
“So in 2017, I spent a lot of time to educate myself.” She followed Andreas Antonopoulos and other crypto influencers.
“As an entrepreneur, I always try to find new opportunities, not as an investment but to develop. At the end of 2017, I started looking at cryptocurrencies from a sports angle."
An idea was seeping into his mind. Sports are global, an international language. This means that many, if not most, of the followers do not live in the country of origin. according to one pollthere are 253 million Manchester United football fans in China or almost four times the total population of the UK!
Sure, sports like F1 travel the world with races in different countries, but to attend sports like American Football, Soccer, or National Basketball Association, you usually have to be in the host country.
However, these fans from all over the world are also dedicated to their teams, which is a great foundation for a business.
Dreyfus points out that sports were ripe for disruption.
“The industry hasn't been disrupted for the last 30 to 40 years, unlike most other industries in the world. Travel booking, appointments of course, taxis, banking: all have been more or less disrupted. The sport is still pretty much the same as it was years ago. Managing these global brands can be quite risk averse.”
Fan tokens are a way to create a new source of income for the many fans living abroad.
“On January 6, 2018, I decided to go back to the office after Christmas and say, 'Let's do it. We are launching our business in that space.' And at that time, we are 10, maybe 12, employees. It was a leap of faith,” he says.
“Fast forward to today, we are 300 employees in nine offices around the world. We are the largest company in the blockchain/sports sector, but we are also one of the largest blockchain products that is not an exchange or a wallet. We created the concept of fan tokens”.
Essentially Chiliz (CHZ) is the entry point, allowing fans to go to socios.com and purchase tokens for their favorite National Basketball League, Formula 1, rugby, or other sport team. It's just like operating on any ordinary crypto exchange, except that the main utility of the token is, at least in theory, to allow fans to have a deeper engagement with their favorite club. Utility tokens are primarily a social investment, not a financial one.
Leveling up the fan experience
Fan Tokens allow fans to vote or participate in decisions related to their team, for example choosing the music to play when a goal is scored, the designs on the scarves, or the number a player will wear.
There is a certain similarity to the DAO: where everyone who has the token can participate in the governance of the decisions that matter to them. Dreyfus describes this as a part of government, not property, a kind of sports influence. He is making the fans more participants than passive spectators. His main prize for soccer fans is Living the Dream, where fan token holders can play soccer in their team's colors at the local stadium with a star player, photographers, and commentators—all the work.
“If I had to define this experience in one word it would be: spectacular.” Barcelona BAR football fan on how to play on his team's field with other fans and the best player in the Spanish League, Samuel Eto'o.
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Just as Chiliz and Socios were starting to take off, COVID-19 hit and clubs had to think about what their businesses would do when stadiums were empty. So fan tokens made a lot more sense at the time.
Interestingly, the first COVID-19 and the current crypto winter have worked to the benefit of Socios. Dreyfus feels that the contraction of the cryptocurrency sector is killing off some of the less practical projects, but fan tokens, with their global base of sports fans, will be able to continue to develop without distraction.
However, the World Cup has not worked out in their favor to the extent that many had hoped, and the token fell in the first week.
More marathon than sprint
Dreyfus feels that the real goal of Socios (haha) right now is to engage non-crypto-native fans, to convince them that fan tokens have real value to them, as they are likely to be quite a bit. skeptical at first. Currently an Ethereum token, he says there are plans to launch his own blockchain for the sports industry.
“The company is in the process of developing a 'Chili Chain 2.0' blockchain based on sports clubs, which will be based on the sports industry, with them as nodes and validators,” he says.
“The first iteration of this is planned for the end of this year or early next year. The idea is that there would be a whole ecosystem of sports clubs and fans (and Socios.com) interacting and trading with each other, and generating revenue and rewards.”
Let's give a fan the last word: "Living what your idols experience is priceless, there is no possible comparison."
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