Football Fans Spending Millions on Club Crypto-tokens (bbc.com) 14
Football clubs have potentially made hundreds of millions of dollars selling controversial crypto "fan tokens." From a report: Analysis commissioned by BBC News estimates more than $350m has been spent on the virtual currencies. Some of the tokens are marketed as offering real-world perks to the buyer. But critics say these perks are insignificant - one offered the chance to vote for songs to be played in stadiums - and clubs have insufficient protection for supporters.
So far, across the five major European leagues 24 different clubs have launched or are considering fan tokens, including eight Premier League sides. Most offer tokens akin to a club-specific crypto-currency - virtual coins can be bought and sold and their value rise and fall depending on supply and demand. Some clubs, such as Manchester City, also sell digital collectibles known as NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Most of the clubs offering fan tokens have signed up to a company called Socios that organises the initial sale and subsequent trading of the virtual coins - but other platforms, including Binance and Bitci, are growing too.
So far, across the five major European leagues 24 different clubs have launched or are considering fan tokens, including eight Premier League sides. Most offer tokens akin to a club-specific crypto-currency - virtual coins can be bought and sold and their value rise and fall depending on supply and demand. Some clubs, such as Manchester City, also sell digital collectibles known as NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Most of the clubs offering fan tokens have signed up to a company called Socios that organises the initial sale and subsequent trading of the virtual coins - but other platforms, including Binance and Bitci, are growing too.
Time for regulation? (Score:5, Informative)
People can do what they want with their money - and they should be able to do that.
The problem is, this market is the wild west and people with little to no knowledge of what they are getting into, are going to get burned.
Exactly how NFT's can be regulated, given that, in the case of socios, the CHZ token can be purchased on a DEX, is a difficult one to answer.
If regulators start to crack down, centralised exchanges will drop such tokens like hot potatoes, but DEX's won't - at least for now.
There's going to be an almighty reckoning with the entire DeFi industry at some point - I believe the only reason it has flown under the radar for so long, is that the "traditional" financial world has been manipulating markets and lobbying in favour of cryptocurrencies.
In other words, there's a TON of money to be made very easily - and it is pretty much like taking candy off a baby.
If you have a few million dollars in "spare change", you can buy up a ton of shit coin tokens, massively impact the price, then watch the FOMO action kick in.
When ready, just rug pull. In as little as a matter of hours, if the right target is picked, these whales are seeing 2x, 10x, 20x the "investment" and more.
99.9% of the poor foolish rubes FOMO'ing in, chasing their dreams, get rekt.
The 0.1% who get lucky, can lord it up on social media as to how clever they are - which just perpetuates the myth.
It's gambling, plain and simple.
Regulation is so desperately needed to clean up cryptocurrency and wipe out pretty much all of the scummy scams.
Anyone can conjure up a shit coin with some technical knowledge, create a fake website, promote on social media and just wait till people start to bite.
Lure them in with a massive buy, to artificially inflate the price - bingo, your in - then rug pull, by selling your entire stake and make the money disappear.
Heck, you don't even have to be careful about it - as there's no laws currently in place to stop this practice.
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For Sports in particular, do we regulate the sale of promotional items? We don't regulate the sale of hat, shirts, and other fan items. Why would we regulate NFTs?
These sports things are about money but also about fans, no team wants to piss off its fans.
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Is under the mattress the best place to keep your cash? We don't regulate that.
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Metamask is a "hot wallet", sure, it's good enough - but you probably don't want to be keeping too much in it.
A "hot wallet" means one that is connected to the internet.
A "cold wallet" is one, which isn't.
The benefit of a "hot wallet", is easy transactions.
For a "cold wallet", you have to do a blockchain transaction FROM it to a place where you want to trade.
For super paranoid users, a transaction can be generated on a computer that has never been online, that doesn't expose private keys, copied onto, say,
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I have a few 1000's laying around I can play with, so, wanted to dip my toe in the water and see how it all works.
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Well, there's no way better to piss off fans, than offer an NFT that is worth 90% less, a month later.
The NFT craze is tulip mania on TOP of tulip mania - it's an abstracted speculative asset on top of a market that is more or less, pure speculation.
If you feel a series of binary numbers is yours, because you hold proof you own those numbers, on a supposed immutable ledger, that is ultimately about as good as its decentralisation, go for it.
If you think one day, that bloc
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That hat you bought at the game is worth 90% less too. So is the promotional beer cup you got with your $20 beer. Nothing new here.
Baseball cards are collectible, yes some people see them an an investment, should we regulate baseball cards? If you look at the history of baseball cards, it is fake scarcity that ruined the industry. To be sure, Sports sees NFT like modern baseball cards - a collectible to engage fans, not as an investment. I'm continually shocked at how much money people will spend on sp
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Sure, I get you.
I guess it's the scale and the speed that is so very different.
You can do something useful with a baseball cap - and sure, the same cap without a logo, could probably be had for 50% less and probably has 95% markup in the first place.
Baseball cards - yep, you can own them, a physical thing, but as a kid, I don't recall the collection of cards being about the money.
It was just about trying to collect them all and trade them.
I'm struggling to see digital images in the same way, because of the
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> I don't recall the collection of cards being about the money.
Not exactly about money immediately. Open those packages and hoping to get a rare card was part of the excitement. In the 80s in the US there were tons of baseball card stores that specialized in buy/sell/trade of baseball cards and it drove the industry to create a system of fake scarcity that ultimately killed it.
When my Dad died, we found an unopened case of baseball cards in his closet. No one knew he had those, maybe he forgot about the
End of the Financial Fair Play concept (Score:2)
So no longer are fictional monies from fake player transfers needed for creating fictional revenues...
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