Sporting Crypto

Manchester City's OKX Deal and the Dubai VASP Licence (and some personal news)

Pet Berisha — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 13:30:00 +0000

I’m not usually one to ‘news hop’ on stories, but when it’s the biggest sports business story ever (?) it’s hard not to. And I was going to post this next week, but there is no time like the present.

For those living under a rock, an independent commission found Manchester City guilty of all charges related to serious breaches of the Premier League’s financial rules, and found that the club’s Abu Dhabi sponsorship agreements between 2009/10 and 2017/18 were a ‘sham’.

The TL/DR is that these sponsorships used companies such as Etihad to mask owner investment, with the owner in question being ADUG (Abu Dhabi United Group).

From a crypto perspective, City’s first partner was in December 2020, more than two years after the last season the financial charges span. Nonetheless, everything under current ownership has been (rightfully) called into question.

The verdict first got me asking how much of City’s revenue since then has come from crypto. Which then ended up with me in a rabbit hole about their biggest sponsor, OKX, and their closeness to the UAE, and in particular — certain licensing arrangements during their time as Manchester City sponsors.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) City’s commercial rise 📈

2) The 115 charges ⚖️

3) Crypto sponsorship 🎽

4) OKX in the UAE 🇦🇪

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City’s commercial rise 📈

In the season before the 2008 Abu Dhabi takeover, Manchester City posted £82 million of revenue, and £21 million of it was commercial, per the Telegraph.

By 2012/13, turnover had reached £271.0 million, with £143.0 million of that from what City’s accounts call “other commercial activities”, per the club’s annual report. It hit a record £715.0 million in 2023/24, and 2024/25 at £694.1 million, with £340.4 million of that in ‘other commercial income’.

The thirteen seasons from 2012/13 to 2024/25 add up to £6.65 billion of turnover in City’s published accounts.

Source: Manchester City annual reports

The 115 charges ⚖️

The independent commission’s redacted Core Decision says “Each of the AD Sponsorship Agreements… was a sham”, with the sponsors’ names removed.

It says City’s accounts “wrongly recorded as income sums that ought to have been treated and recorded not as income but as equitable contributions from ADUG”, and that City’s income across those years was “hugely overstated by over £830 million”.

City said they were “disappointed and surprised” and that the club “is innocent of the accusations made by the Premier League”. They have appealed this ruling, and sanctions will be decided at a separate hearing in front of the commission.

That’s a lot of ‘sponsorship’ that wasn’t really sponsorship.

So when it comes to crypto, is there any impact on how we view Manchester City’s activities?

Crypto sponsorships 🎽

City’s accounts split revenue into matchday, UEFA broadcasting, other broadcasting and other commercial activities.

I went through every annual report and financial report City publishes (by that I mean, my agent did), from 2013/14 to 2024/25, and OKX only appears in the narrative pages, six times in total.

Animoca Brands were City’s first crypto partner, on 21 December 2020, for mini-games and digital collectibles, in a deal that also included Melbourne City. It’s uncertain whether there was a commercial angle here.
3Key Technologies were announced on 11 November 2021 as City’s “Official Regional Partner in Decentralised Finance Trading Analysis”. The company’s website had no contact details, registered office or company number, and City suspended the deal within days.

City’s largest deal in this space by far is OKX. The cryptoasset exchange. OKX are one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, and have sponsored the likes of McLaren Racing amongst others, as well as Manchester City.

They became City’s official crypto exchange partner in March 2022, with financial terms not disclosed. In July 2022 they became the front of the training kit sponsor for 2022/23, in a deal City AM described as “worth tens of millions of pounds per season”, and Forbes put at more than $20 million.

In June 2023, OKX moved onto the sleeve of the men’s and women’s match shirts.

A source told Forbes the deal would pay more than $70 million over three years, including the two previous agreements, with the Daily Mail reporting £55 million over three years. City’s own 2023/24 annual report calls the sleeve deal “an uplift from the previous agreement as Official Training Kit partner”.

For comparison, Manchester United’s training kit deal with Tezos was reported at £20 million a year in February 2022.

So taking the reported numbers at face value, we can estimate OKX at around £18 million ($23.5m) a season from 2022/23, plus around £2.5 million for the exchange partnership’s first months in 2021/22, which is a guess because that specific value has never been reported.

That’s roughly £57 million ($75m) across four seasons.

OKX in the UAE 🇦🇪

The value is far less interesting than the timing

OKX’s first Man City deal was announced on 4 March 2022.

→ Two weeks later, OKX sponsored the closing party at Crypto Expo Dubai.

OKX went on to sponsor City’s training kit on 11 July 2022.

→ Three days later, on 14 July 2022, they announced a provisional licence from Dubai’s Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) “to provide services to qualified investors in the UAE”.

VARA gave OKX’s Middle East entity a preparatory licence on 15 June 2023, with an office at Dubai World Trade Centre and plans for 30 staff.

→ Fifteen days later, on 30 June 2023, OKX moved onto City’s sleeve in the deal described by Manchester City’s own accounts as ‘an uplift’.

OKX announced their full VASP (virtual asset service provider) licence on 16 January 2024, though it stayed “non-operational” until they met VARA’s remaining conditions, per their release. They officially launched in the UAE on 10 October 2024 at the Museum of the Future, and Pep Guardiola was the special guest, on stage with OKX’s chief marketing officer Haider Rafique talking about the City partnership.

In May 2025, Khaleej Times profiled Rafique, credited him with the City sleeve deal, and noted he went to school in Abu Dhabi. He told them “I think we can do a lot more with Man City, because I think people living here feel Man City is a [beacon of] national pride for them.” And “I want to bring Pep here and do a session. I want (star striker Erling) Haaland to kick a ball from one tower to another.”

On the face of it, this looked like a standard sponsorship deal, and the numbers in question are not huge. But lining this up against announced sponsorship deals, with the context surrounding Manchester City’s 115 charges, one can’t help but wonder whether this was more about licensing, rather than sponsorship.

City Football Group’s reputation, credibility and legitimacy have been badly damaged by the charges. And it’s funny that, whilst I’m unsure that OKX’s sponsorship falls under the same ‘sham’ description that the independent panel attached to many of Manchester City’s sponsorship deals, there is certainly a question mark to now be attached to the timings of OKX’s VASP licenses.

Concurrently, as I write this, OKX and NYSE parent ICE have notified the SEC that it intends to launch a tokenized securities trading venue under the U.S’ new innovation exemption rules.

Twitter tweet

There is a story to be told here, I’m sure. For now, I’ve just tried to join some dots. OKX are one of the largest exchanges in the world and no doubt legitimate, and perhaps the Manchester City sponsorship was just the cost of doing business.

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This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not financial, business or legal advice. These are the author’s thoughts & opinions and do not represent the opinions of any other person, business, entity or sponsor. Any companies or projects mentioned are for illustrative purposes unless specified.

The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

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It's crucial to provide our readers with clear information regarding the inherent nature of services and products that might be covered in this newsletter, including those advertised by our sponsors from time to time. When you buy cryptoassets (including NFTs) your capital is at risk. Risks associated with cryptoassets include price volatility, loss of capital (the value of your cryptoassets could drop to zero), complexity, lack of regulation and lack of protection. Most service providers operating in the cryptoasset industry do not currently operate in a regulated industry. Therefore, please be aware that when you buy cryptoassets, you are not protected under financial compensation schemes and protections typically afforded to investors when dealing with regulated and authorised entities to operate as financial services firm.

Sorare Raise Five Years After SoftBank Series B

Pet Berisha — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Sorare have raised again, five years on from the $680 million Series B that SoftBank led at a $4.3 billion valuation in September 2021. This one is a lot smaller. Benchmark, Accel, Partech and Kibo Ventures put in tens of millions of euros, the two co-founders invested alongside them, and no valuation has been disclosed.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) The raise 💰

2) Five years on from SoftBank 🕰️

3) The rebuild 🎮

4) Licences and the NBA 🏀

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The raise 💰

Nico Julia, Sorare’s co-founder and CEO, announced the round on X on 3 September 2026:

Twitter tweet

In it, he said:

“Three years ago, we started rebuilding Sorare from the ground up. It shows: net revenue grew 85% year over year in H1 2026, from more than 100 000 Managers who bought cards (above the levels of the 2021 wave). Growth by itself is not enough: we plan to be profitable again by the end of 2027.”

“We’re opening a new era and closed a new funding round, backed by @benchmark, @Accel, @PartechPartners and @KiboVentures. All four have backed Sorare for years. My co-founder @adrien_sorare and I invested alongside them.”

Julia told Maddyness it is an “eight-figure raise”, and said “The first tranche has just been finalized, and a second will follow in the coming weeks and months.”

The round pays for three things, according to Julia.

🎨 Sorare 27 card reveal in the coming days

🚀 New Arcade Set in early September

🏀 NBA returns in October”

For the uninitiated, Sorare sells officially licensed digital player cards as NFTs. You buy and trade the cards, put them into fantasy line-ups scored on real matches, and win rewards. Football is the core, with the NBA and MLB additional game modes.

[Psst. Nico came on the Sporting Crypto podcast in May 2025 to talk through the rebuild]

Five years on from SoftBank 🕰️

Sorare raised a €40 million ($50 million) Series A in February 2021, led by Benchmark, with Accel and angels including Antoine Griezmann, Rio Ferdinand, Alexis Ohanian and Gary Vaynerchuk. Cards traded had skyrocketed from $60,000 in January 2020 to $4.2 million in January 2021.

Seven months later, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led the $680 million Series B at an eyewatering $4.3 billion post-money valuation, with Atomico, Bessemer, D1, Eurazeo, IVP and LionTree, and Benchmark, Accel and Headline returning.

Sorare have not been insulated from the NFT market collapsing, however, even if the platform reached mainstream usage with over 3 million registered users, per Maddyness, and had 150,000 monthly active users at the time of the Series B.

Indeed, when I last wrote about Sorare in September 2025, I proposed they had four options on the table

A token launch
Raise at a much lower valuation than $4.3 billion
Push to profitability
A sale of the business

That was following some rough, back-of-the-napkin EBITDA and revenue numbers, guesstimated from a mixture of onchain analytics and publicly disclosed, as well as leaked numbers from various publications.

This is a raise, most likely at a lower valuation, to push to profitability (in late 2027, per Julia’s estimations). So it’s a mix of 2) and 3).

The rebuild 🎮

Sorare’s push to profitability has come hand in hand with a rebuild of game mechanics. It centres around ‘Arcade’.

It’s free to play, so you don’t need to buy a card, and the aim is for those free players to buy cards for the paid competitions.

“Earlier this year, we launched our new Arcade game mode: a free-to-play, fast-paced and rewarding product that has been an absolute hit. A new generation of fans joined: over 1 million new users in the last 18 months.”

Sorare are aiming for €15 million to €20 million of net revenue from Arcade this year. Growth was 17% in the second half of 2025, per Maddyness, and then 85% in the first half of 2026. “We’ve regained a very strong growth momentum,” Julia told them, and on the World Cup, “We saw the wave coming, but the competition acted as the hoped-for catalyst.”

In November 2025, The Big Whale reported a redundancy plan covering about 35% of the workforce, which Maddyness put at about 30 of 110 positions. The New York office closed, and Julia told The Big Whale the aim was to “accelerate our return to profitability” and “simplify the organisation” by centralising in Paris.

He also said more than €500 million of contractual commitments with leagues, clubs and players had been renegotiated and/or withdrawn.

Maddyness reported in June 2025 that annual licensing costs had been cut by a factor of five while keeping most of their partners, with about €42 million of activity planned for 2025. Julia told The Big Whale in November 2025 he envisaged profitability by the end of 2026, which now has been pushed out to 2027 by Julia’s recent comments.

Licences and the NBA 🏀

Sorare’s licences still cover football, basketball and baseball. Former and current partners include the Premier League, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, MLS, NBA, NBPA, MLB and MLBPA.

That Premier League deal ended at the close of the 2025/26 season, according to Fortune, and no renewal has been announced, after a reported £120 million four-year deal was signed in 2023.

Indeed, that contract expiry comes against a turbulent regulatory backdrop for the French unicorn, and there is currently a criminal investigation ongoing, as well as a trial for unlicensed gambling operations due to take place in June 2027. Sorare have pleaded not guilty to those charges, per the Irish News.

In January 2025, the National Crime Agency (NCA) in the UK obtained an order at Westminster Magistrates’ Court under the Proceeds of Crime Act, freezing £10,024,041 in a Barclays account in the name of The Football Association Premier League Limited.

The money in question was the first instalment of the Sorare Premier League deal.

The NCA said the order was “to prevent dissipation of the funds while the NCA investigates any potential links between those funds and alleged third-party criminality”. There is no allegation of wrongdoing by the Premier League, and Sorare told Fortune “Sorare is not the subject of an investigation by the National Crime Agency. The freezing order concerns funds held in an account which does not belong to Sorare.”

On 11 September 2026, Westminster Magistrates’ Court extended the freeze by four months at the NCA’s request, per The Independent, which reports that the NCA and Luxembourg authorities are investigating Sorare. District Judge Sam Goozee said the freeze was “necessary and proportionate to prevent dissipation of funds which are suspected to be the fruits of criminal conduct and enable proper investigation by the authorities”.

The judge found no suggestion that the Premier League “themselves engaged in unlawful conduct”.

The Luxembourg authorities are investigating Sorare at the same time, and no details of that investigation have been reported.

The Premier League are still owed £7.5 million from their deal, which is yet to be paid by Sorare, the court heard.

It remains to be seen whether or not Sorare have done anything wrong here, or whether it was a third party involved in the deal; however, there is undoubtedly a story to be told here, which I’m sure we will follow in the months and years to come.

To conclude:

Sorare, as a business, have serious baggage with these proceedings and their previous lofty valuation. That doesn’t mean it can’t still be a success, but balancing profitability with potential court fights and a waning licence portfolio leads me to believe that a sale is still likely in the next few years.
By the time Sorare are in court regarding unlicensed gambling operations, we’ll have finally seen GTA6 launch. All joking aside, Sorare was founded in 2018. Had a deal in place with the Premier League in 2023. After FTX crashed in late 2022. This created regulation in the EU (MiCA) in 2023 and 2024, and in the US with GENIUS, and likely soon with the CLARITY Act. Oh and in that time, Kalshi and Polymarket have helped prediction markets take a forecast 21% share of NFL wagering in the US this season, per Eilers & Krejcik Gaming via CNBC, and Kalshi are likely to be seen in the Supreme Court. We (the UK) definitely need to move faster to protect customers, of course, but also to not stifle innovation. Something I’m afraid we’ve done badly, especially in crypto, in a post-FTX world. Setting the NCA’s involvement aside for a second, because if there is wrongdoing there from Sorare, that will play out the way it needs to. But generally speaking, we need to do a better job with companies that don’t fit strictly into one regulatory box.
Sorare’s trajectory has gone from fantasy behemoth to niche player. This doesn’t mean it can’t succeed in that specific realm, but the world in which it is a DK/Fanduel style success is no longer a plausible one.

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Robinhood Buy Crypto[dot]com Stake in Prediction Market push

Pet Berisha — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 16:00:11 +0000

This piece was first published on Predicted, the newsletter I write with Omar El Safy about the business of prediction markets.

Robinhood took a minority stake in Crypto.com and its prediction-market arm OG.com, then started moving college football contracts away from Kalshi and onto OG.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) What Robinhood bought 🧾

2) Robinhood still rents most of its own flow 📊

3) Why Robinhood chose OG 🔍

4) Robinhood's venue portfolio 🗺️

5) What we're watching 👀

This was first published on Predicted, our prediction markets newsletter spun out of Sporting Crypto earlier this year. It’s just hit 1000 subscribers and is growing fast.

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What Robinhood bought 🧾

Robinhood ($HOOD) has taken a multi-year distribution deal to carry OG.com's event contracts in the Robinhood app, making OG.com an infrastructure and clearing provider for its own retail flow. That came alongside a minority equity stake in both OG.com and its parent, Crypto.com, which clears on the NADEX DCO.

The pricing of the minority investment was set in line with Citadel Securities' $400 million investment on 16 July 2026, which valued Crypto.com at $20 billion. OG.com's standalone spin-off is valued at $5 billion.

Before we get into this, a quick reminder:

A DCM is a Designated Contract Market, the CFTC licence that lets you list contracts.
A DCO is a Derivatives Clearing Organisation, the licence that lets you stand behind them and settle. OG.com holds both, as does Rothera, and there are very few of either.
An FCM is a Futures Commission Merchant. This is essentially the broker and customer layer account.

A DCM and DCO are valuable regulatory assets, but a licence on its own supplies no liquidity, market makers or customers, and a venue still needs those from somewhere.

CDNA (Crypto[dot]com Derivatives North America) is the largest clearing operation and the only one hosting multiple brands.

Source: The Prediction

Robinhood already routes to three other venues for clearing, including its own, Rothera, which claims a sizeable chunk of US prediction-market volume.

That makes Robinhood’s move look counterintuitive at first glance. Why are they routing away from their own clearing venue?

Kalshi still clears the overwhelming majority of US prediction-market notional volume, while CDNA and Rothera remain much smaller. The move is less about CDNA’s current share than the capabilities it gives Robinhood access to.

It gives Robinhood another regulated venue with an established sports-contract offering.

Monthly share of US notional by clearing venue, 21 May to 7 September 2026. Source: The Prediction

As a share of each month's US notional volume, Kalshi has held between 82% and 87% since May 2026, while Rothera has climbed from 0.1% to 2% and CDNA has sat at 2% to 3%.

So why add a fourth?

Robinhood still rents most of its own flow 📊

One way to see just how much Robinhood still relies on outside venues is to look at the contracts it chooses to surface to customers.

Robinhood’s own event-contract page shows, on each day, which exchange each featured contract is sourced from (with some relatively low-level dev tools use, we got a few numbers).

By collecting those daily snapshots and using the Wayback Machine to recover older versions, we can reconstruct how the share of listed contracts attributed to each venue changed over time.

Method: each event on Robinhood's page carries an "exchange" field in its own data (Kalshi, Rothera, ForecastEx or CDNA). We read that field at each Wayback snapshot and counted the split.

Rothera first appears on 1 June 2026, eleven days after it went live, carrying 1.4% of featured events. By the end of August 2026, it reached 16.1%. Kalshi went from 88.4% to 66.1% in the same hundred-day period.

On 31 August 2026, college football predominantly sat on Kalshi. By 9 September 2026, a portion of it had moved to OG, and it is gone from Kalshi's featured set.

Each event on Robinhood’s Prediction Markets page carries an exchange and market field in its underlying page data, identifying Kalshi, Rothera, ForecastEx or CDNA. We extracted that field directly from the page code on 9 September 2026 and counted the split (not volume).

Robinhood controls that display layer, so the mix is a useful record of its own sourcing and routing choices over time. It is a proxy for distribution decisions rather than trading volume.

Rothera’s data tells a similar story. While the World Cup was on, that is what traded. Once it finished, the volume moved to NFL, basketball and baseball. Which is exactly what you'd expect from a venue that used the World Cup as a launchpad.

Why Robinhood chose OG 🔍

Robinhood already routes to three other venues,

Volume = Notional
Source: The Prediction

Robinhood is building an alternative to Kalshi, and it has chosen OG because it is the closest available substitute for what it has sourced from Kalshi to date: a functioning, liquid, CFTC-regulated exchange-and-clearing stack with an established catalogue of sports contracts, including college football and parlays.

Indeed, in an article by Sportico, CEO of Crypto[dot]com Kris Marszalek said (paraphrasing) “in 36 months from now, only a few venues [will] still focus on their own exchanges”

Evan Walman, Global Legal for OG.com commented on the post saying:

“I don’t think many people, investors and prospective operators understand the nature of what it takes (let alone the sustained amount of capital required) to operate these licensed venues 24/7 365, and maintain profitability - our turn key infrastructure is a great solution.”

And so, if this is to be believed, then Robinhood’s diversification makes sense.

Robinhood began routing a selection of college football contracts to OG on 8 September 2026, after college football had been supplied through Kalshi only days earlier.

ForecastEx is heavily skewed to weather, and Robinhood already sends weather contracts there.

Rothera is an affiliated venue, but its book is still shaped heavily by the World Cup, which accounts for 75.5% of all notional traded there, with baseball another 20.3% and pro and college football together below 1%. It isn't built to handle the demand Robinhood likely needs to keep it growing as a revenue line. Rothera is still new, and Robinhood needs to plug those gaps.

OG already has the product mix and operating history Robinhood needs. Its exchange cleared $28 million in college-football contracts over the selected period, versus $13 million at Rothera, roughly 2.2 times as much.

It also supports parlay-style contracts (combos), which traded $1.1 billion over this comparison period, a product closely associated with Kalshi’s sports expansion.

Across the same window, CDNA cleared $3.5 billion of notional volume activity across six brands, including OG, DraftKings ($DKNG), Fanatics and FanDuel ($FLUT).

OG alone did not clear $3.5 billion, but the underlying exchange, market-making relationships, risk controls and clearing operations were already being used at scale.

Rothera took from November 2025 to May 2026 to launch and is still working to find a durable post-World-Cup product mix.

By buying a minority position in OG and committing flow to its infrastructure, Robinhood gains exposure to a proven, sports-capable clearing stack much faster than it could build a second one itself.

Kalshi remains the broadest independent supplier and likely still the most important venue in Robinhood’s portfolio, for now. But the decision to move a live college football category to OG suggests that Robinhood is deliberately creating a route around Kalshi, and the ability to shift categories between providers is the strategic asset it is buying.

Robinhood’s venue portfolio 🗺️

How Robinhood relates to each of the four clearing houses it routes contracts to, 9 September 2026. Source: The Prediction. Kalshi = Kalshi Klear

Robinhood is diversifying its options for clearing event contracts. It is sending categories to whichever exchange already has the right tooling, liquidity, product set and experience.

It also reduces Robinhood’s dependence on Kalshi. College football can move to OG, weather can sit with ForecastEx, and Rothera can keep developing the categories where it already has a foothold.

Kalshi is still the largest independent supplier, clearing 82-87% of US prediction-market notional volume every month from May to September 2026, and it has category breadth Robinhood cannot yet replicate elsewhere. But it is no longer the only place Robinhood can send its customers.

The OG investment is one step toward a second credible sports event contract supplier (prediction markets’ largest category).

The moat is users and liquidity. Robinhood has the users, and its ability to direct them gives it the power to help build liquidity wherever it chooses to send flow.

That means the exchanges need Robinhood too. It owns the customer relationship and can move flow between four venues, taking stakes in the infrastructure it wants to support.

The more routes it has, the easier it is to shift categories away from Kalshi when another exchange offers better economics, product coverage or liquidity. That reduces Kalshi’s hold over one of Robinhood’s fastest-growing products. Event contracts revenue grew more than 10 times year on year to $156 million in Q2 2026, already Robinhood’s second-largest trading line, behind only options.

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Socios and Securitize Plan Tokenised Sports Team Equity

Pet Berisha — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:00:10 +0000

Securitize and Socios announced a partnership on 2 September 2026 to develop regulated tokenised equity offerings in professional sports teams, under the brand Socios Equity Token. Chiliz's own version of the announcement says the tokens "are currently under development and are not currently available for purchase or investment."

As we previously covered on Sporting Crypto, tokenising teams and giving retail access has been a dream for many in this industry for a long time. This is the first time the two companies with the most relevant licences and sporting connections have had a go.

The TL/DR is: Chiliz want to raise money from fans and institutions to take minority stakes in clubs.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) The offering 🧾

2) Who Securitize are 🏦

3) What this is 🔍

4) The market 📊

5) Why I'm sceptical 🤔

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The offering 🧾

On 27 August 2026, the Chiliz Group, Socios' parent, announced the Socios Equity Token as a new category of digital asset. On 2 September 2026, Securitize were named as the issuing partner.

Chiliz's 27 August 2026 announcement says "Through the acquisition of minority stakes in participating clubs by The Chiliz Group, Socios Equity Token ecosystem will offer eligible participants with a structured economic interest in the teams they invest in."

As per press releases, Securitize handle "regulated securities issuance, investor onboarding, ownership-record administration, transfer controls and ongoing servicing" through their regulated affiliates in the United States and Europe.

The first offerings are expected to go through Securitize's European Trading & Settlement System, which operates under the EU's DLT Pilot Regime. Securitize got that licence from Spain's CNMV on 26 November 2025, and told CoinDesk at the time that they expected their first EU issuance in early 2026. Both releases now say this initiative is "expected to become the first tokenization project launched through" that system.

Alexandre Dreyfus, founder and CEO of the Chiliz Group and Socios, said on 27 August 2026 that "Professional sports franchises are estimated to be worth around $500 billion globally, yet for most, owning even a small stake in a club has always been out of reach."

Carlos Domingo, co-founder and CEO of Securitize, said "Professional sports teams represent a significant asset class that has remained largely private and difficult to access."

Chiliz say "More details about the participating clubs, offering terms, eligibility and timing will be shared in due course, as individual offerings progress through the necessary club, league and regulatory approvals."

What Chiliz did publish is a survey. Research they commissioned from OnePoll, across fans in the US, UK, Italy, Spain and South Korea, found 72% would buy a digital asset offering club equity, at an average of £913 ($1,240) each. 77% said owning a financial stake would make them feel more connected to their club, and 85% of US fans said they were interested, compared to the 72% global average.

The problem is, fan demand has never really been the issue here. And we’ll get into that in this piece.

Who Securitize are 🏦

Securitize are a company that we’re covering for the first time on Sporting Crypto, so it’s worth explaining who they are.

They were founded in 2017 and are run by Carlos Domingo, who co-founded the business. They are a transfer agent and tokenisation platform, which in plain terms means they keep the legal register of who owns a security and can put that register on a blockchain.

They are best known as the platform behind BUIDL, BlackRock's tokenised money market fund. As covered on Tokenized, the New York Stock Exchange named Securitize as its first digital transfer agent in March 2026, to mint blockchain-native stocks and ETFs and maintain ownership records onchain.

On 2 July 2026, they listed on the NYSE as SECZ through a SPAC merger with Cantor Equity Partners II, raising over $400 million at a $1.25 billion pre-money valuation. They tokenised their own shares on Avalanche and Solana on the first day of trading.

Their Q2 2026 results saw revenues of $14.4 million, down 5% on the prior-year quarter, and a net loss of $21.7 million. Average tokenised assets under management were a record $4.3 billion, up 16%, and 663 active funds were being serviced by Securitize Fund Services.

In Europe, Securitize Europe Brokerage and Markets, S.A. is a fully authorised investment firm and runs the Trading & Settlement System under the DLT Pilot Regime.

The DLT Pilot Regime caps what can be listed. It is an EU regulation that lets a licensed operator run trading and settlement of tokenised securities with exemptions from some of the usual market rules, and it comes with guardrails. Shares can only be admitted if the issuer has a market capitalisation under €500 million, and the total value of instruments on any one infrastructure is capped at €6 billion. It’s worth noting that a reform proposal in 2026 would remove the per-instrument caps and lift the aggregate limit to €100 billion.

What this is 🔍

The structure is a sports investment vehicle with a retail share class, on tokenised rails.

Chiliz raise money into a vehicle, and that vehicle takes a minority stake in a club. Securitize turn that entity's equity into a security that lives on a blockchain, and Socios sell fractions of it to fans, with institutions invited alongside. The 2 September 2026 release names both of these customers; "eligible fans seeking a deeper economic relationship with the teams they support" and "institutional and private-equity investors seeking exposure to a high-value alternative asset class."

That is what Arctos and Sixth Street already do with minority stakes, with two differences;

Chiliz distribute to fans through a brand with 70+ club relationships
The paperwork sits on Securitize's rails instead of a fund administrator's.

It’s an interesting shift for Chiliz, and one that moves away from licensing. Fan tokens cost Chiliz a minimum guarantee, they mint licensed fan tokens, sell them, and the clubs and Chiliz take a cut. Now, they’re sourcing equity, tokenising it, and selling that to fans and investors.

The releases don’t spell out the financing concretely, but the 2 September release does say the companies will "work with sports teams, existing owners and institutional investors to structure and tokenize minority equity interests", and names fans and institutions as the two buyers.

Access to elite sports equity already exists. Manchester United are listed in New York. Juventus are listed in Milan and Borussia Dortmund in Frankfurt. Atlanta Braves Holdings has traded on Nasdaq as BATRA since Liberty Media split it off in July 2023, and Formula 1 trades as FWONA. Madison Square Garden Sports, which owns the Knicks and Rangers, filed with the SEC to split into two listed companies, MSG Knickerbockers and MSG Rangers, with the spin-off expected by the end of October 2026.

A fan with a brokerage account can own the Braves, F1, United or Juventus today, and the Knicks shortly. But it is true that ‘sports as an asset class’ is largely private.

But does tokenisation mean anything when it comes to solving the access problem?

Not really.

The pitch is that the equity comes attached to the fan relationship, through the Socios app, to fuel superfandom.

I have been pitched this idea since 2021, to not much avail. Indeed, although the regulatory frameworks are now there, I do wonder whether the market is.

The market 📊

As we previously covered on Sporting Crypto, the top 100 sports franchises are all worth $2 billion or more, around half a trillion dollars combined (which coincidentally is the same number used by Dreyfus).

Let’s run the maths on this market.

If 20% of owners were open to tokenising, that is $100 billion of club value in play.

However, what gets sold is a minority stake, so at 20% of each of those clubs it is $20 billion.

(20% is pretty aggressive, too).

That’s a small market, but one big enough for Chiliz to pivot into, considering the size of the fan token market (~$150m) and that they have likely exhausted most of the income they could make from issuing them.

Sports is an asset class because of scarcity. Deloitte's Annual Review of Football Finance had Premier League clubs at a combined pre-tax loss of £135 million in 2023/24, and ESPN reported that figure rising to £948 million in 2024/25. Juventus posted a €199 million net loss in 2023/24 and have not made a net profit since 2017. Franchise values have compounded anyway, because there are only so many of them and there is always a richer buyer. And perhaps logically, the next liquidity unlock is another group of market participants who do not care about the upside financially, but rather the ownership and attachment fans have to their team.

And we’ve seen this creep into the market with varying degrees of success.

Watford tried something like this with Republic as the issuing partner. They put roughly 10% of the club on Republic and Seedrs in June 2024 at a £175 million valuation, looking to raise £17.5 million at £12.44 a share. The shares carried no voting rights but the club said it would pay dividends; investors had the option to receive tokens, and the club planned to facilitate future trading of those tokens.

The Watford Observer reported the offering finished on £3,919,334 from 3,125 investors, under a quarter of the £17.5 million target, while Kingscrowd's record of the US Republic listing has $5,482,779 from 3,347 investors. In March 2025 Watford and Republic cancelled the entire campaign and refunded investors. The club said the money had sat with a third party and "investors will receive a full refund." The shares were never issued, so there was never anything to tokenise or trade.

Why I'm sceptical 🤔

I’m unsure this takes off for a combination of reasons:

Sports team owners do not need this type of financing lever to access capital: FSG owner Liverpool just sold ~30% minority stake to Jeff Bezos led consortia. Why sell to 100,000 people when you can sell to one?
Access is globalised via blockchain. But does the tokenised equity do anything else? When Republic looked to tokenise Watford's shares, I kept asking the question “what will fans do with those shares?”. There needs to be some additional utility layer; otherwise, blockchain is just used as a record of ownership and a way to globalise access. Those two things are valuable, but I don’t think they’re valuable enough to two key parties: the owners selling stakes and the fans buying portions of it.
The clubs that say yes will be the ones that need the money: The owners I have spoken to, and the companies working with them, are not necessarily hell-bent on selling equity to fans. I wonder what the sweet spot is between a) needing the capital injection b) global brand and c) giving a real superfan loyalty experience to equity owners, and what teams sit in that sweet spot.

The regulatory rails are there now, which they weren't in 2021, and Securitize are a serious issuer.

This feels like a buzzy announcement from two parties that want to be seen as diversifying their revenue streams, but in reality I’m unsure that this will be a big market for them.

I’d love to be on the wrong side of this one, because I think it is very ‘cool’ in theory, but I’m unsure there is enough meat on the bone here for either party to substantially grow their respective enterprise values.

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Circle’s Chelsea Deal Shows Crypto Perception Has Ways to Go

Pet Berisha — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 16:00:09 +0000

Chelsea Football Club named Circle Internet Group as a Principal Partner and official front-of-shirt partner from the 2026/27 season, on 28 August 2026. Circle and USDC go on the men’s, women’s and academy shirts. The first men’s appearance was Sunday 30 August 2026 at home to Brighton.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) The deal 🎽

2) Circle’s business 💵

3) The boy who cried wolf 🐺

4) The rails 🛤️

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The deal 🎽

Circle Internet Group, listed on the New York Stock Exchange as CRCL, have become the official front-of-shirt partner for Chelsea Football Club from 2026/27, debuting this past weekend on Sunday 30th August. Both marks, Circle and their stablecoin USDC, sit on the front of shirt.

This is across the entire club, not just the men’s team; Chelsea Women and reserve teams will also wear branded jerseys. Circle’s own footnote says the announcement is a sponsorship, and “does not constitute an invitation or inducement to acquire, hold or trade any cryptoasset, or to use any financial service.”

The terms of the deal, per the Daily Mail Sport, are an initial year with an option to extend. Chelsea have not had a proper front-of-shirt (FoS) sponsor since Three, whose £40m a year deal came off the shirt in March 2022 after Roman Abramovich was sanctioned. Since then the market has treated Chelsea’s asking price as high, reportedly $85m to $90m a season per Sportcal, and the club have started three seasons in a row with a blank chest. And indeed, BBC Sport called the Circle partership a one-year deal “believed to be about £50m per season, though the exact figures have not been given.”

What Chelsea have had since Three is a run of mid-season stopgaps:

Infinite Athlete, a sports data company, signed in late September 2023 after the season had already started with no sponsor, and stayed on the shirt for 2023/24 only.
DAMAC, the Dubai property developer, took the last few games of 2024/25, debuting at the Conference League semi-final against Djurgården in May 2025 and staying on for the final.
IFS, an industrial AI company, signed in February 2026 for the remainder of 2025/26, worth about £15m for the shirt element per Sportcal, and then left.

BingX, the crypto exchange, remain an Official Principal Partner and men’s training-wear partner for 2026/27, per Chelsea.

Circle’s business 💵

UK residents will no doubt be unfamiliar with Circle.

They were founded in 2013, by Jeremy Allaire, a successful internet entrepreneur, who still serves as their chief executive and chairman.

12 years later, they listed on the New York Stock Exchange in the second quarter of 2025, becoming one of crypto’s biggest success stories ever, a reflection of crypto ‘growing up’.

USDC, which is issued by Circle, is a stablecoin, which is a fiat currency on a blockchain. Or better defined as a token on a blockchain, backed 1:1 by money or money equivalents.

USDC is “always redeemable 1:1 for US dollars” and “backed 100% by highly liquid cash and cash-equivalent assets.” Most of the reserve sits in the Circle Reserve Fund, USDXX, an SEC-registered 2a-7 government money-market fund managed by BlackRock Advisors, with The Bank of New York Mellon as custodian. The rest is cash, mostly at large banks. Deloitte & Touche issue monthly AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) examinations attesting that management’s assertion (reserves at least match circulation) is fairly stated. Circle publish weekly holdings and mint and burn flows on the same page.

If you’re reading this and thought “another dodgy crypto company buying their way to legitimacy”, think again.

Circulation on Circle’s own USDC page was $73.7 billion as of 27 August 2026. At the end of Q2 2026 it was $73.3 billion, and Circle booked $701 million of revenue and reserve income for the quarter. The business model is that they sit on the cash and T-bills behind USDC and earn the yield.

S&P Global Ratings gave USDC a Stablecoin Stability Assessment of 2 (strong) on 18 December 2025, with the asset side at 1 (very strong), still listed in S&P’s August 2026 recap.

In the US, Circle hold state money-transmitter licences, a New York BitLicense and a FinCEN money-services registration. In July 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) gave final approval for First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A., operating as Circle National Trust, and the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) approved a limited-purpose trust. The trust bank opened on 24 July 2026.

In Europe, Circle France holds an electronic-money licence from France’s ACPR (17788) and a Markets in Crypto-Assets Crypto-Asset (MiCA) Services Provider authorisation from the AMF, E2026-005, dated 24 April 2026 on the licences page.

Circle also holds UK e-money issuer authorisation. That is an Electronic Money Regulations permission, and because the UK’s qualifying-stablecoin issuance permission does not exist yet, the USDC used here is an overseas and EEA-issued token.

TL/DR: Circle is highly regulated and just got a bank charter. And the only reason they’re not “fully” regulated across the board in the UK is that… well, Brexit means we didn’t inherit MiCA, the stablecoin framework the EU created… 2 years ago.

The UK is still writing their own rulebook. The FSMA Cryptoassets Regulations 2026 passed on 4 February 2026, and the Financial Conduct Authority’s stablecoin-issuance rules are written, but the permission itself does not start until 25 October 2027, with applications opening 30 September 2026. The Bank of England’s systemic-sterling package is still in consultation, closing in September 2026.

The boy who cried wolf 🐺

Crypto’s perception problem in the world is pretty justified.

The public collapse of FTX in 2022, a crypto exchange that sponsored dozens of sports assets, was the crescendo in a litany of dodgy deals that we have seen between crypto organisations and sports teams and leagues.

It is normal, then, that as a football fan, when you see something adjacent or connected to crypto, your instant feeling is “scam”.

Digging into the R/Soccer Reddit, you can see the back and forth between fans of different clubs, all with varying degrees of scepticism.

We’re (in some weird inverse way) seeing crypto’s ‘Boy who cried wolf’ moment.

The wolf is there now, and it is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

This is a real, legitimate, publicly traded business, with several licenses across the biggest and most important jurisdictions in finance.

There is, however, one infringement cited against Circle during the partnership announcement from some corners of the internet, which is a Wisconsin court case.

It is a misdemeanour contempt complaint filed in April 2026. The criminal complaint says Circle “did intentionally disobey, resist, or obstruct the authority, process, or order of the court” on or about 30 December 2025.

And it has been used as a stick to beat Circle.

The TL/DR is there was an investment scam in which criminals convinced victims to convert their cash to USDC, and then send it to them. In August 2025 a county court ordered a freeze, and Circle complied and froze about 381,000 USDC in the scammers’ wallets, per ICIJ. Freezing means Circle added those wallet addresses to the USDC blacklist, so the tokens cannot be sent or received by anyone.

In December 2025, a judge signed a warrant asking them to invalidate those tokens and issue the same amount of new USDC to a sheriff’s wallet. Circle said they could not, because tokens sitting in a third-party wallet are not theirs to burn and reprint. They filed to dismiss on 30 June 2026, and as of the last reporting in July 2026, the motion is still pending.

Dante Disparte, Circle’s chief strategy officer, wrote on 10 April 2026 that “when Circle freezes USDC, it is not because we have decided, unilaterally or arbitrarily, that someone’s assets should be taken from them. It is because the law requires us to act.”

The USDC terms say they can block addresses tied to illegal activity and that they may have to freeze or surrender reserve dollars if a valid government order requires. The dispute is about restitution, about whether a county court can make them mint replacement tokens for a wallet they do not control. So the funds are frozen, but Circle cannot ‘double print’ the same dollars. So it’s a legal question for US courts. Not necessarily a question of Circle’s legitimacy.

And for companies of this size, which is a compliment to Circle, it almost comes with the territory. Especially with financial organisations.

Why?

Because criminals need to move money. And launder it. When they have stolen through digital means, or choose digital means to move it, then the institution is liable if it does not flag it proeprly.

Circle are not alone in this, far from it, and it’s not a crypto problem.

Standard Chartered are Liverpool’s front-of-shirt sponsor this season, and have been for many. In 2012 NYDFS fined them $340 million, and said the conduct involved transactions of at least $250 billion. In April 2019 they paid $947 million to US agencies and £102 million to the FCA, per their own release. The FCA figure was £102,163,200 for AML (anti-money laundering) controls failings in UK wholesale correspondent banking and UAE branches. (by the way, Standard Chartered does not offer high street retail banking in the UK).
American Express are Brighton’s main club partner and shirt sponsor. Their 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, filed 24 July 2026, said they had been engaging with regulators on AML programmes and “expect to be subject to enforcement action, which could include civil money penalties”.
Monzo, a digitally native bank, now on Coventry’s shirt, have been penalised too. The FCA fined them £21,091,300 on 7 July 2025 for anti-financial-crime systems between 2018 and 2020, and for breaching a restriction on high-risk accounts, including “over 34,000 high-risk customers.”

It’s just that crypto’s ledger is public, so we see the scams as soon as they are flagged by anyone, rather than waiting for regulator investigations and announcements.

The rails 🛤️

Crypto’s perception problem will take a long time to shift. I remember when my dad didn’t like using credit cards online in 2007. There was a lack of trust in something new. So we may require a generational shift here to change things. And of course, for crypto to continue growing and maturing.

But it’s undeniable that crypto the technology, (perhaps not the assets), is inevitable, especially in payments and finance first and foremost. And the data backs that up.

Stablecoin supply is at $309.6 billion at the time of writing on 31 August 2026, per DefiLlama, from $134.8 billion at the end of January 2024. Adjusted transfer volume, with bots and exchange rebalancing stripped out, was $1.78 trillion in June 2026 alone, per Visa Onchain Analytics.

Source: Visa Onchain Analytics (Allium) and DefiLlama

Outside of stablecoins, tokenised stocks and ETFs are at $2.55 billion of on-chain value on 30 August 2026, per rwa.xyz, from $12.8 million at the end of January 2024.

Source: rwa.xyz

And proper regulation is helping. The GENIUS Act, the US stablecoin law, was signed on 18 July 2025. Adjusted stablecoin volume was $2.27 trillion in the quarter before it and $2.82 trillion in the quarter after, then $4.46 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, per Visa Onchain Analytics.

Source: Visa Onchain Analytics (Allium)

It’s, of course, the boring stuff that consumers don’t care about, which is using this technology most legitimately first. So that perception problem may never leave the Western world. But it is undeniable that crypto, the technology, has product-market fit, and will be a step change for finance, the economy, and therefore the world.

There will be more scams in crypto. It’s like Xabi Alonso saying Chelsea will lose games this season. It’s going to happen. But the undercurrent is that crypto is growing up and becoming a gamechanger for the boring rails in finance.

And ps., yes, the kit is ugly. I am sorry, Chelsea fans. (I am not. You have had four years of blank jerseys and short-term logos. You can wear a gold dollar wordmark for a season)

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Socios Sign Five US College Programmes for Fan Tokens

Pet Berisha — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:00:06 +0000

Socios have signed Penn State, LSU, Maryland, Michigan State and Texas A&M to sell fan tokens on their platform, per Playfly and Socios on 21 July 2026. The tokens have not launched, and Socios dated a launch before the end of the 2026 calendar year.

The TL/DR is: fan tokens are coming to US college sports.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) The five programmes 🏈

2) How the product is meant to work 🎫

3) The tokens already trading in open markets 📉

4) What happens when the licence ends 📄

5) Why the athletic departments want in 💰️

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The five programmes 🏈

Fan Token Management US, part of the Chiliz Group, signed the deals alongside Playfly Sports. Playfly work with 65+ college athletic departments and Socios want 30 university athletic departments on the platform over the next 12 months.

Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO of Chiliz and Socios, called them "the first Fan Tokens in U.S. college sports".

As we previously covered on Sporting Crypto, Southern Methodist University launched the SMU Mustang Coin with Krida on 2 June 2026, billed as the first officially sanctioned fan coin in US college athletics, so that claim may be inaccurate depending on what we’re classing as a fan token.

LSU are in this first group of five as well, having already gone live with an onchain loyalty scheme in 2025 with Uptop, now a Rain company. That product was Geaux Rewards, a card-linked programme that minted points, with John Timoney, Uptop's CEO, explaining more on a recent Sporting Crypto podcast.

A Wall Street Journal valuation of college football programmes for 2026, reported by Deseret News, put Texas A&M at $1.593 billion and LSU at $1.543 billion, with Penn State eighth at $1.411 billion. Chiliz said in press releases that college football pulls in more than 39 million fans a season across Division I. Penn State Athletics did not immediately comment, per Onward State.

How the product is meant to work 🎫

Socios describe fan tokens as utility tokens that give holders polls, rewards and exclusive experiences. Playfly's announcement says supporters can vote on fan-focused decisions and take part in exclusive experiences. Penn State's ticker, the listed token, launch date and programme-specific utilities have not been published, and Socios say those details come closer to launch.

A "meaningful proportion" of token-sale revenue is meant to go to each school's NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) programme. Playfly say that revenue cut will be publicly visible and on-chain, and that they will administer the NIL activations in line with NCAA and conference rules.

The release also flags "performance-tied token supply gamification" and a "sentiment marketplace". The nearest shipped version is what Chiliz ran at the 2026 World Cup. Participating national-team fan tokens were burned after every win. After Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in the 19 July 2026 final, more than 1 million $SPAIN tokens had been burned, per Chiliz.

Although that didn’t do much for the price…

Socios have not said whether the college tokens get the same burn mechanic. They said they would define "new characteristics and new tokenomics" for the US tokens after the 2026 World Cup, with a launch dated before the end of the 2026 calendar year.

The tokens 📉

These five programmes are joining a Socios network of more than 70 sports organisations, predominantly European football clubs including Arsenal, Manchester City, Paris Saint-Germain, FC Barcelona and Juventus, plus national teams including Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Belgium.

The problem is, almost all, if not all, of those tokens are underwater.

FC Barcelona's $BAR token launched in June 2020, peaked at $79.26 on 21 April 2021 and is now $0.28, down 99.6%, with a market cap of $7.6 million, per CoinMarketCap.

Paris Saint-Germain's token is the largest of the club tokens with a market cap of $8.43 million. The token itself peaked at $61.23 on 10 August 2021, the week Lionel Messi signed, and is down 99.2% from that high, now about $0.50, per CoinMarketCap. The entire CoinMarketCap fan-token category is a market cap worth $124 million.

I've heard that back in 2020 and 2021, clubs were making nine figures in a quarter selling fan tokens and taking a cut. The nearest figure I can pin down is the Telegraph in August 2021, which had Europe's top clubs having pocketed £150 million, around $204 million, from the platform. Dreyfus told the Telegraph in the same piece that four clubs had made almost £20 million each in the previous 12 months.

And albeit promises from Socios, the model has not moved at all since then. They are still 'utility' tokens that move in price based on random events, signings, rumours, listings and more. Essentially, they are tokenised sponsorship real estate that trade based on… well… not that much. Clubs still take a cut of the primary sale, and after that, what happens to these publicly traded tokens doesn’t matter much to them. They are making money on issuance, not trading.

What happens when the licence ends 📄

One of the most repeated criticisms of the Socios model is the way these tokens are licensed. Indeed, there is still no clean way for these tokens to exist outside the license window. Socios' own platform terms, updated 28 April 2026, say the partnership agreements will eventually expire or be terminated, and that fan tokens may "partially or fully lose their Token Functionalities" as a result. Holders can still hold them and still trade them on whatever venue will list a token that no longer has a live partnership.

Because they trade on speculation, they have a propensity to collapse when the licence ends. We've not seen many examples, if any, of a licence rolling off cleanly. It makes total sense for them to fall to zero, or near zero, once the school or the club is no longer attached. Because, why would the token hold any value without that license?

Why the athletic departments want in 💰️

In March 2026 the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) published a joint interpretation of how federal securities laws apply to certain crypto assets. Fan Tokens are listed there as an example of digital collectibles, with a footnote to Socios, and the agencies note they have "hybrid characteristics" and could be classified as digital tools, per the SEC release. Socios put that same guidance in the first paragraph of the college announcement.

NIL is now truly here, and athletic departments need to make more revenue. College fandom carries from campus into alumni life, and that is the audience Playfly already sells to sponsors across 65+ college athletic departments. New fans are ‘minted’ every year (pardon the pun) due to student intake, something that other sports simply do not have.

Penn State AD Pat Kraft wrote on 30 June 2026 that the department has secured more than $1 billion in guaranteed future revenue. Penn State on SI, covering the same letter, had the department topping $250 million in gross athletics revenue in the 2024-25 fiscal year, and spending more than $250 million for the first time.

Craig Sloan, Playfly's CEO, called the token deals "a new revenue stream that can help support student-athletes through NIL initiatives."

But do they know what they've gotten themselves into?

This feels like a flashback to 2020 and 2021, when football clubs in Europe were desperate for revenue, and pushed the boat out on unregulated assets in the form of sponsorship, to buffer their warchests. I hope that history doesn’t repeat here, because fan tokens are almost universally disliked by football fans, and they have not been additive at all to the fan experience.

But considering the new tokenomics have not been outlined or revealed, I sit with a healthy dose of scepticism that these will go in a different direction to their European sporting counterparts in years gone by.

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State of Prediction Markets Q2 2026 (REPORT)

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Prediction markets are probably the hottest topic in all of finance and tech right now.

They’ve landed awkwardly in a place that cuts horizontally across sports, gambling, capital markets, crypto and much more.

And thus, Sporting Crypto is obliged, of course, to cover it. So much so that we actually spun out a prediction market newsletter called ‘Predicted’ that you should definitely sign up for.

In this edition, we do a deep dive into the report we just launched over on Predicted. It’s the ‘State of Prediction Markets Q2 2026’, and it’s probably the best aggregation of insights and analytics for prediction markets that I’ve seen (yes, I’m extremely biased).

The best hits are from the 70 pager are in this edition!

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

Prediction Markets are larger than ever
But they’re still largely sports
The World Cup was massive for Prediction Markets
Robinhood built their own exchange
Polymarket U.S became a big player
Are the volumes real, or are parlays confusing us?
Sports wagering dominates, but hedging is becoming real
Ultimately, this will become much bigger than just sports

👋 You can read the State of Prediction Markets Q2 2026 report over on Predicted.

It’s totally free, so have a read below 👇️

Read the report here!

Read the Q2 2026 report

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01 - Prediction Markets are larger than ever

Prediction markets recorded $111 billion in notional volume between April and June 2026, per Artemis.

Q2 2026 by the numbers. Source: Artemis

That is more than 2024 and 2025 combined, and roughly 2x the entirety of 2025 on its own.

Year on year, that is a 1,764% increase from Q2 2025.

Volume hit $28.5 billion in April 2026, $30.2 billion in May 2026, then $52.7 billion in June 2026, the biggest month in prediction markets so far, largely fuelled by the World Cup frenzy.

Monthly notional volume by venue. Source: Artemis

June 2026 alone accounted for 47% of Q2’s volume.

02 - But the volume is still largely sports wagering

Sports was still the biggest category by a distance.

In fact, Kalshi was 86% sports in Q2 2026.

Source: Dune

By June it was more concentrated still. Kalshi traded $33 billion that month and roughly 87% of it was sports.

03 - The World Cup was massive for Prediction Markets

The World Cup accounted for $17.04 billion of the quarter, or 15.3% of total volume.

Source: Artemis

In the US, prediction market apps had more daily active users than the sportsbook apps during the tournament, per Apptopia.

Source: Apptopia

04 - Robinhood built their own exchange

Q2 was where the big boys came to play.

Robinhood ($HOOD ( ▼ 2.22% ) ) launched Rothera in June, their own CFTC licensed exchange and clearing house, built as a joint venture with Susquehanna. It has cleared over 3.5 billion contracts since.

It went live just before the World Cup started, and 98% of its Q2 volume came from the tournament.

Source: Robinhood Q2 2026 earnings release

By the end of the quarter Rothera had cleared 2.1 billion of Robinhood’s 13.6 billion contracts, at a lower take than the rented rails it replaced.

Robinhood booked $156 million of event contract revenue in Q2, and now earn more from prediction markets than from stocks or crypto, which is insane.

Coinbase, by contrast, reported a rate of over $100 million annualised, roughly a 6x gap right now.

05 - Polymarket U.S became a big player

Polymarket US rose from 3% of total Polymarket volume to 27% in six months.

Source: Artemis

They went into combos in time for the World Cup, and launched their own stablecoin in pUSD, which hit $500m in circulation.

Polymarket also keep taking the majority of new onchain wallets each month, and brought in dynamic fees on the international platform during the quarter.

06- Is this real life? Or is it just combos (parlays)

Kalshi introduced Combos in December 2025. By Q2 2026 they were ~30% of its notional volume. Polymarket introduced them just before the World Cup, so the dataset there is smaller.

Kalshi Combos as a share of Q2 notional volume. Source: Kalshi data and Dune

A sportsbook parlay is a single-counterparty bet in which the book sets the line and guarantees a payout.

A Kalshi combo is priced by market makers through a request for quote (RFQ) system, and the hold gets split between the makers and the exchange.

Which brings us to the gap between notional and handle metrics.

Kalshi’s combos are ~30% of Q2 notional on $1.67 billion of handle.

An event contract settles at $1 or $0. Notional counts the contracts at their full $1 value, so it measures the maximum that could pay out. Handle is the cash that actually gets risked.

On a single contract, those two sit reasonably close together. A contract trading at 50c books a dollar of notional for fifty cents of stake. So the ratio of notional to handle is 2:1.

A combo multiplies the legs together. Four legs at even odds each land at a combined implied probability of around 6%, so the buyer pays roughly 6c for a contract that still books a full dollar of notional.

Kalshi monthly notional volume, with combos shaded. Source: Kalshi data via Dune

Kalshi traded roughly $65.7 billion across Q2, going on the monthly figures we have reported here, $14.8 billion in April, $17.91 billion in May and $33 billion in June. At 30%, combos were around $20 billion of that notional, sitting on $1.67 billion of handle. That is about twelve dollars of headline volume for every dollar staked.

Every extra leg at evens halves the probability and halves the stake, while the notional stays at a dollar. Kalshi’s $20 billion of combo notional on $1.67 billion of handle works out at an average combined probability of about 8.4%, which sits between a three and a four leg combo.

So this isn’t faux volume, but there is more than meets the eye, because combos carry a different risk profile, and net different economics compared to single event contracts. I’d wager (no pun intended) that the net revenue on combos is razor thin, compared to single event contracts.

08 - Sports wagering dominates, but hedging is becoming real

The Jeffrey, a bar on the Upper East Side, promised free drinks if the Knicks won Game 1 of the Finals, which was roughly $10K of exposure if the promotion hit. A $5K Kalshi position paid $8K when the Knicks won 105-95. They ‘broke even on a risky promotion, bought peace of mind for the night’.

CA Osasuna did the same thing with relegation. Going down from Spain’s top league La Liga would have cost the club millions in lost broadcast money, so they bought coverage. Howden arranged €6 million of protection for a €1.2 million premium, Game Point Capital and Greenlight structured it, the contract was written on Kalshi, and Susquehanna took the other side.

Osasuna stayed up in 17th, so the contract expired worthless and the €1.2 million premium was simply the cost of the cover. The club call it ‘a common practice in professional football’, and Kalshi have since filed a formal hedging programme with the CFTC. We covered both of those at the time.

In both cases, the buyer already carried the risk and used the exchange to lay it off, with a market maker pricing the other side.

And that is fascinating because they are to some extent, hedging where the counterparty is a mixture of people wagering and market makers.

09 - Ultimately, this will become much bigger than just sports

Meta ($META ( ▼ 2.38% ) ) considered buying Kalshi, then told staff to build Arena instead, which I we we covered in July 2026.

Hyperliquid brought prediction markets onchain through HIP-4 and took 0.3% market share in their first quarter. Their outcome markets are fully collateralised binary contracts that settle at 0 or 1, with no leverage and no liquidations, traded in the same account as perps and spot.

Adjacent launched their RED and BLUE indices in late June and raised a $2.5 million pre-seed led by Night Capital, pitching a benchmark layer above the venues rather than another order book.

Kalshi listed forward curves for GPU rental prices on 14 July, tracking what it costs to rent Nvidia’s B200, H200 and A100 chips by the hour over the coming weeks and months. As Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour put it: ‘Compute is the new oil. Like every commodity before it, it needs a real derivatives market.’

A forward curve is a chart of what the market expects something to cost in future. Fix your energy tariff or your mortgage rate and you have used one. Two firms write the number into a private deal, and Kalshi only earn a fee when they trade the underlying contracts to lock the price in.

So while right now sports is the thing that has caught fire across the board, the expectation is that long-term that dominance will decrease. And Q2 was a window into that, with a variety of new product offerings coming to the fore.

The full report is over 70 pages, and it is free.

Read the Q2 2026 report

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Gacha Without the Cards

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:02:53 +0000

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A protocol called Fake World Assets became the second-highest-earning application on Ethereum in late July. It was built by two developers. The TL/DR is: It’s Gacha without a physical asset to redeem.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) What is FWA? 🎰

2) How it Works 🔧

3) The Data 📈

4) Cards, or Anything? 🃏

What is FWA? 🎰

FWA stands for Fake World Assets.

The name is a wind-up of 'real world assets', the label tokenised collectibles platforms use for the Pokémon and sports cards sitting in their vaults.

It’s a sub industry that Sporting Crypto has covered in depth. Courtyard, Collector Crypt, Phygitals and Fanatics have built a real economy selling randomised packs of vaulted, graded cards, with the NFT acting as the digital receipt for a physical collectible in a warehouse.

FWA uses the same mechanic, creating a gacha experience native to Ethereum.

For the uninitiated, Gacha is the Japanese capsule-toy mechanic that went on to power most of mobile gaming in Asia. You pay a fixed price, you receive one randomly selected prize from a pool, and the fun is in not knowing which one. Here the prizes are NFTs, the randomness comes onchain from Chainlink VRF (Verifiable Random Function), and their docs describe the whole thing as "an onchain, randomized NFT acquisition protocol".

It launched on 3 July 2026, built by Token Works, a self-funded two-developer team who go by Adam and Teto, and relaunched on new contracts on 20 July. Within about a week of the original launch, the FWA token rose from a market cap of roughly $475,000 to $38.8 million, per Odaily.

It arrives in a period of depression for the crypto market, and near non-existence of an NFT market. Blue chip NFT collections trade at a fraction of their 2021 peaks, with NFT sales totalling $5.6 billion for the whole of 2025, and monthly volumes have been ~$300 million in 2026.

How FWA Works 🔧

The pool has two sides.

Depositors supply the prizes. They list NFTs into the pool, each paired with an amount of ETH backing. That backing does two jobs. It sets the odds of the NFT being drawn, and it funds what the FWA call an "irrevocable standing bid", an offer to buy the NFT back at 85% of its backing that the depositor cannot withdraw.

‘Pullers’ pay the acquisition price for one random draw. The price is the expected value of the pool plus a 5% surcharge, with the Chainlink VRF fee charged separately. The odds run inverse to the backing, so you are far more likely to pull a lightly backed NFT than the CryptoPunk.

By late July 2026, the pool held more than 1,500 NFTs, CryptoPunks included, per The Defiant.

And when you pull something you don't want, you sell it straight back for 85% of its ETH backing, instantly. You keep the NFT or you take the ETH. The 15% spread and the surcharge get split between depositors, the protocol and rewards.

There are guardrails. Buyers can set a maximum price and slippage bounds before they draw, and any overpayment refunds automatically.

Most people take the money. Per Odaily, 82.3% of early pulls were sold straight back.

There is also, of course, a token. $FWA could not be bought on the open market at launch; indeed, the most interesting aspect of the $FWA protocol token is that it cannot be bought directly (per Odaily). To acquire this token, you must genuinely play the NFT gacha machine.

Token Works calls it loss-to-earn. You lose the pull and get paid in the house's token. The memetic energy is clearly strong with this project.

And the depositors are the house. Every acquisition fee pays them a share. One CryptoPunk sits in the pool backed by 276 ETH, and per Odaily it earned its depositor 12.7 ETH in fees in just over a day, without ever being drawn. With around 74,000 draws made at that point, the odds of anyone pulling it were tiny. If someone does pull it, they either keep the Punk, and the depositor loses it, or they take the 85% exit and the depositor gets the Punk back.

The Data 📈

In the first four days after the relaunch, FWA saw roughly 2,000 ETH ($2m) of volume across 90,000 transactions, including around 35,000 pulls, per Crypto Briefing.

Fees hit $152,000 on 21 July, $369,000 the next day, then $536,000, then $1.11 million, and a peak of $1.63 million on 25 July, per DefiLlama.

Protocol revenue that day hit $447,604, which briefly flipped Collector Crypt, the Solana platform that has led crypto gacha since late 2024 and recently crossed $1 billion in lifetime volume. Their CEO Tuom Holmberg came on the podcast in July 2026, when they hit $100 million in weekly volumes. Collector Crypt have accumulated $64.6 million in fees since launching in late 2024, per DefiLlama.

By 28 July, The Defiant had FWA as the second highest-earning application on Ethereum, with $167,869 in daily revenue. That put it behind only Sky, the rebranded MakerDAO, at $464,303, and ahead of Aave, Uniswap and Lido.

A month in, cumulative fees have passed $8.6 million. A caveat on that number. DefiLlama counts fees, which for FWA include the depositors' share, so it sits closer to a casino's hold than it does to revenue. The protocol's own cut is around $1.9 million.

Cards, or Anything? 🃏

Typically, the tokenised colletibles companies we’ve covered on Sporting Crypto have had RWAs (physicals) behind the inventory in these digital packs.

Courtyard sell randomised packs of vaulted Pokémon cards. Collector Crypt do the same on Solana. Beezie run gacha claw machines for vaulted collectibles. Fanatics Collect tapped Phygitals for onchain packs.

Panini, on the other hand, do have digital-only NFT packs - but they are not repacks; rather, they are primary IP. I covered their $10m sales month in last week's newsletter.

The story the tokenised collectibles platforms tell is about the cards or the physical inventory being sold. Provenance, grails, vault operations, the collector who wants the physical thing shipped.

Courtyard peaked at $78.4 million in a single month last August, with the tokenised collectibles sector hitting $114.5 million at its top, and weekly trading card revenue across Courtyard, Collector Crypt, Emporium and Phygitals reached $7.5 million earlier this year, up 200% year on year. This year the platforms have driven $115 million in fees between them, with the monthly total rising from $8.6 million in January to $23.7 million in June.

July 2026’s fee numbers are consistent with that. The card platforms' combined fees fell to $15.2 million in July from $23.7 million in June.

So I have been asking myself whether the cards were ever the point. What drives the demand, and what is the moat?

The gamified experience of not knowing what you’re getting for your spin, roll or rip is clearly a consumer behaviour that is trending one way.

There’s a lot made of millenials or genz having short attention spans and needing a constant drip of gratification via the means of scrolling any social platform. But gatcha experiences have created something weird and funky. The gamification (or gamblification) of unknown gratification.

With all that in mind, Building Courtyard's PSA relationships, seller network, vault operations takes years and many resources.

But on these platforms, there is a throughline. Most pulls sell straight back on every gacha platform, backed or unbacked by physical assets. Beezie's CEO Andrea Miele told me on the Sporting Crypto podcast that the buyback is the business.

Instinctively, my first thought when I saw FWA catch fire was that it would take share from the tokenised collectibles platforms the way prediction markets took share from memecoins and crypto spot trading. I don't quite know if that analogy holds true, but prediction markets and memecoins share the same wallets and the same risk appetite, hence the reallocation of volume.

Indeed, I’m sure some of the card tokenised collectibles' platforms' growth has come from people who have never held crypto, and FWA cannot onboard them. But the overlap is the crypto-native audience, whilst marginal, could be a high-velocity, deep-pocketed slice of card platform volume, and that is probably what FWA competes for. And that slice might be people who are much more willing to spin $10k on the machine than your average collector. So thin or not as a number of wallets, it will be interesting to see if there is any volume drain here into this weird, funky new protocol.

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Panini Blockchain hit $10m in monthly sales

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:00:00 +0000

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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

Panini Blockchain Overview 🎴
The Data 📊
The Revenue 💰
Concluding Thoughts 💭

In July 2026, collectors traded $10.9m of digital Panini cards.

It is the third biggest trading month in the platform's history.

I last wrote about Panini in March 2026, when they opened a bridge to Ethereum and named OpenSea their exclusive marketplace. Trading that month was $2.04m.

Five months later, the volumes have increased more than 5-fold.

01 - Panini Blockchain Overview 🎴

Panini Blockchain launched in January 2020.

It runs on Panini's own chain, as a closed loop. You buy digital packs, open them, and trade the cards on Panini's own marketplace. There are challenges to play and a crafting mechanic where you burn cards to earn points. Same licensed IP as the physical business, sold digitally as NFTs. (Though as I said, they did open a bridge so collectors can also trade these assets on OpenSea, so it isn’t totally closed loop anymore).

Two numbers matter here.

Primary. Panini selling packs to you. That is them issuing new digital cards via digital packs.
Secondary. Collectors selling to each other, on their marketplace.

All time, the platform has accumulated $203.3m in volume including primary, and $128.0m without it. So roughly 37% of everything that has ever happened here was Panini selling product.

Pack sales hit $3.35m in June 2026, the biggest primary month in the platform's history. Panini dropped their Prizm FIFA World Cup 2026 packs on 19 June 2026, first off the line at $150, with hobby packs five days later at $25.

Primary sales reached $3.13m in January 2026 with no tournament at all, so big pack months are not unique to this.

02 - The Data 📊

September 2025 is still the biggest trading month on the secondary markets with $14.16m in volume. June 2026, the World Cup 2026 month, comes second at $13.28m and July 2026 third at $10.92m (so far).

The NFT bubble pushed trading to $10.9m in 2022. It cooled with everything else after that, down to $6.3m in 2023 and $7.2m in 2024.

Then the collector boom arrived. Trading reached $54.2m in 2025, and 2026 has already passed $41.1m in seven months.

September 2025 processed 338,905 trades. July 2026 processed 128,542, which is 38% of the activity for 77% of volume.

The average sale price went from $31.69 in March 2026 to $84.95 in July 2026.

The curious thing about the data is that it is largely the same number of market participants.

July 2026 had 2,211 unique buyers. September 2025 had 2,735. June 2026, the second biggest trading month ever, had 2,739.

Sellers have outnumbered buyers roughly two to one all year. There were 4,360 of them in July 2026.

When I wrote about Panini crossing $5m a month in March 2025, I finished on this:

"$5-6m monthly revenues seem like an exception to the norm considering their monthly unique buyers and sellers sit in the low thousands... I know serious collectors spend vast amounts, but this doesn't feel sustainable unless the userbase grows."

The volumes and average sale per item have increased, but the audience has not done so substantially.

Panini take a cut of all of this on the secondary market. Their terms and conditions charge the seller 5% on marketplace sales up to $50,000, and 2.5% above that, so at an average sale of $84.95 almost everything sits in the 5% band.

Which means July 2026's trading earned them somewhere around $546,000. September 2025, the bigger month, was closer to $708,000.

Across 2026 so far the marketplace has produced roughly $2.05m in fees. In the whole of 2024 it produced about $359,000.

03 - The Revenue 💰

Deciphering exactly how much net revenue is made in the collectibles space these days is pretty difficult. But we’ve had a go.

(Reminder: fees are Panini taking a slice of someone else's trade on the marketplace. The pack sales are their own primary revenue)

Pack sales have brought in $8.97m across 2026, on top of the $2.05m in marketplace fees. Call it $11m this year.

Which makes 2022 the biggest year this platform has ever had on revenue, at roughly $21.5m. Almost all of it was pack sales during the NFT bubble.

Since then, estimated revenues are likely down, but trading now carries a real share of the total revenue, and the marketplace fees have gone from $359,000 in 2024 to $2.05m in seven months of 2026.

Panini's card business has historically turned over $1bn to $1.2bn a year.

So this feels like a drop in the water, but I think beyond the numbers there is some tea leaf reading to do.

04 - Concluding Thoughts 💭

(1) Panini's NFT marketplace is a real business now

Roughly $11m of revenue in seven months of 2026, between pack sales and marketplace fees, in a depressed NFT market. That’s pretty impressive from a heritage brand like Panini.

(2) But their recent volumes are driven by big licences like FIFA

September 2025, June 2026 and July 2026 are the three biggest trading months in the platform's history. June and July were World Cup months, so there is a throughline to big IP being available for purchase.

(3) And… they are losing those licences

The NBA went in October 2025, the NFL in March 2026, and UEFA back in 2022. The World Cup follows after 2030. That doesn’t leave much left.

(4) But perhaps licensing isn't the only way

Look at Courtyard, Collector Crypt and Beezie. They buy licensed cards someone else already printed, vault them, and resell them as digital packs. Courtyard alone has passed $1bn in marketplace volume. Indeed, competitor Fanatics partnered with Phygitals earlier this year. In a world where licenses are scarce, the collectibles market has gotten creative. I wonder if Panini would ever consider going in this direction. Digital repacking, gacha and guaranteed revenues on a secondary market are revenue lines they will explore in my opinion, or they will simply have a much smaller business in the future.

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State of Blockchain Ticketing 2026 Ft. Mike Saunders, CEO @ XP

Pet Berisha — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:01:51 +0000

The Sporting Crypto Podcast is back! 🚨

In this episode we're joined by:

• Mike Saunders, Founder & CEO @ XP

We discuss:

🧠 XP's innovative approach to ticket resale marketplaces
⛓️ Using blockchain for stablecoin escrow while tickets remain offchain
🎫 Creating an onchain order book for offchain ticket resale
🧑‍⚖️ Current legal controversies in US ticketing with StubHub and Ticketmaster
🌐 Ticketmaster's monopoly and the natural resale market need
💸 Blockchain enables value transfer but faces industry resistance and regulatory overlap
💡 XP solves fan liquidity fears with instant buy and sell options
🤖 Blockchain and AI agents will reshape online marketplaces starting with ticketing

Listen here 👇️

State of Blockchain Ticketing 2026 Ft. Mike Saunders, CEO @ XP

The Sporting Crypto ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/sporting-crypto/ ) Podcast is back! In this episode we're joined by: • Mike Saunders ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/saunders/ ), Founder & CEO @ XP ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/xptix/ ) In thi...

Sporting Crypto • Sporting Crypto

📹️ Watch on YouTube

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The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

College Sports Step into Crypto

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 16:00:00 +0000

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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

Ripple put the XRP logo on every Kansas Jayhawks jersey
The rule change and the settlement bill that reopened college sports to crypto money
What is Krida Coin, the 'official coin' of SMU athletics?
Why college sports are a unique beast

Kansas Athletics announced a multi-year partnership with Ripple on 8 July, making XRP the official cryptocurrency of Kansas Athletics. The logo will appear on the uniforms of every one of their teams, across their venues and on their digital properties.

It is the first time a crypto brand has been stitched onto the jerseys of a major college athletics programme.

01 - The Deal

Ripple will fund financial and technology education programmes for KU student-athletes, covering traditional finance and digital assets, and will expand their talent pipeline connecting Kansas graduates to careers in tech.

Kansas AD Travis Goff said the deal "reflects a shared commitment to innovation and excellence".

Bill Self, their Hall of Fame basketball coach, went further: "It's a critical time in college athletics to be bold, and that's what is being accomplished."

There is a personal thread running through this one. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse is a KU alumnus and former student body president, and has called watching Jayhawks games a "guilty pleasure".

His framing of the deal was the most honest part of the announcement: "With the lawsuit behind us, now is the time to remind people what makes XRP unique, useful and worth paying attention to."

Interestingly, Ripple, parent company and issuer of XRP, is not named as the sponsor - XRP the cryptocurrency is.

I remember 2 years ago speaking with a head of partnerships at a major US sports team who told me that they “couldn’t even get near” having an actual cryptocurrency as the sponsor, and would have to settle for the foundation issuer in most cases.

02 - The Rules Changed

Here are a few things that made this possible.

The first is the NCAA. In January 2026 they ruled that Division I teams can display corporate logos on jerseys from August 2026. The Big 12 moved immediately, unveiling a conference-wide Monster Energy patch deal worth around $20 million per year, roughly $1 million per school.

Kansas announced the Ripple deal one day later. And because the Monster agreement only locks up the energy drink category, every school is free to sell its own patch to anyone else.

The second is the House settlement. Since July 2025, schools can pay athletes directly, capped at roughly $20.5 million per school in year one and climbing to a projected $32.9 million by 2034-35.

On top of that, the NCAA and its conferences owe $2.8 billion in back pay to former athletes, spread over ten years.

Athletic departments have to find that money from somewhere.

Thirdly… Ripple settled a lawsuit with the SEC.

The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, alleging XRP was an unregistered security. The case ended in August 2025, with Ripple paying a $125 million penalty and the courts leaving intact a ruling that XRP sold on exchanges is not a security.

And that fight nearly ended the company. Speaking at the KU School of Business last week, Garlinghouse revealed that he and co-founder Chris Larsen seriously considered winding Ripple down and handing their XRP to shareholders pro rata, rather than fight a government with "infinite power and resources". The battle cost Ripple around $150 million over four years.

He said: "I'm glad in retrospect, but that was not obvious at the time."

These three things combined are why college sports are suddenly opening their doors to crypto sponsors and partners.

03 - What is Krida Coin?

Kansas Athletics and Ripple are not alone here.

A month ago, on 2 June, Southern Methodist University launched the 'SMU Mustang Coin' with Krida, a Dallas-based startup founded by an SMU finance graduate. It was billed as the first officially sanctioned fan coin in US college athletics.

The official pitch is utility. Fans earn and redeem coins for priority event access, behind-the-scenes content and experiences with brand partners. The launch material is explicit that the coin is not a security, not an investment contract and not a financial instrument.

This is how it is outlined:

"This isn't just a coin. It's a new relationship between universities and the communities that already love them."

And reading Krida’s own website…

kridacoin.com tells fans to "trade them in a dynamic marketplace", to "stay on top of live price charts" and to "monitor real-time trading volume". It describes Krida Coins as "the official digital asset class for colleges, sports teams, and professional organisations".

We have seen this product before. Socios brought fan tokens to European football from 2019, with the same pitch. Vote on club polls, unlock perks, feel closer to your team.

What fans actually did was trade them, and most fan tokens sit deep in the red from their 2021 peaks. It never became more than a sponsorship asset wrapped into a speculative crypto asset.

Krida is that model, transplanted into college sports, where a large chunk of the fanbase is under 21. And honestly, any marketing materials that start with “this isn’t just a coin”, is something I’d be incredibly sceptical of.

04 - College Sports Are a Unique Beast

Professional teams inherit their fans. You support who your family supports, or whoever is closest to your postcode, and a club's intake of new fans is slower, generational and incumbent on star power.

College sports have a conveyor belt.

Every autumn, a new class of students arrives on campus and becomes the fanbase. Four years later they graduate, and the fandom goes with them for life. As I wrote when LSU became the first college programme to launch an onchain loyalty scheme in 2025, the fandom is intrinsic to your identity in the formative years of adulthood.

The creators of the LSU programme are Uptop, acquired by Rain. Uptop’s CEO John Timoney Gomez said this to me when I interviewed him for that piece:

"You get a new batch of fans every year. New fans are minted when they show up at the school every year, and the alumni base is incredibly loyal, and they become fans for life."

In the same conversation, he described power-conference athletics as "the scale of the pro game, without question in many cases bigger".

No other sports property gets guaranteed delivery of thousands of new fans every single year, plus an alumni base that stays loyal for decades.

And that is why Ripple want in. Their focus has been institutional, like all other blockchains, in order to generate activity. But the majority of token holders are still retail investors, and they are heavily incenticised to increase their retail footprint.

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Zuck Wants Prediction Markets

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 16:00:00 +0000

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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

Why Zuckerberg ordered Meta to build a prediction market app, code-named Arena, and how he tried to buy Kalshi first
The state of prediction markets by the numbers
The mess underneath the charts, from a widening regulatory war to Polymarket's fake-winnings scandal
Why prediction markets do not work as a business line for Meta, and what the industry gets wrong about the customer

PS. This piece was first posted on Predicted, our new newsletter focused on Prediction Markets.

Mark Zuckerberg has ordered Meta to build a prediction market.

The New York Times reported on 23 June 2026 that a small team within the company is building a standalone app, code-named Arena, where users predict the outcomes of real-world events such as sports results, elections, and stock moves. People close to the project describe it as a top priority for Zuckerberg himself.

Arena will run on play money. Users get a daily allotment of virtual currency to place their predictions and earn points rather than cash. No real stakes, at least to begin with, although they have not ruled out real money later.

This is not Meta's first attempt at a forecasting game. They ran a prediction app called Forecast from 2020 until they closed shop in 2022.

Here is the detail that makes Arena more interesting. Before Zuck decided to build, he tried to buy.

NPR reported on 30 June 2026 that Zuckerberg met Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour last year to discuss an acquisition. The talks never got past an early stage, and accounts differ on why. Some say Kalshi had no interest in selling while their valuation climbed. Others say Meta grew wary of the legal and ethical questions hanging over the industry.

It still begs the question;

Should Meta be building a prediction market?

If they want to make it real money, then I think it's a bad idea.

I have spent the last few weeks talking to founders, investors and operators across prediction markets, and I keep landing in the same place. Gamified and free, this is a fine engagement toy. Paid, as an actual business line, for many businesses, does not work.

01 - The Data

To set the scene, let's look at some of the recent data.

It's nothing but extraordinary.

Kalshi are in talks to raise at a $40 billion valuation, according to the FT, roughly double the $22 billion mark they raised at in May 2026.

That would value a single event-contract exchange above most fintechs. It comes after Kalshi recorded $17.91 billion in notional volume in May 2026, their ninth consecutive monthly record, up 21% on April.

Polymarket are reportedly raising at around $15 billion. Their volume went the other way, falling to roughly $7.1 billion in May 2026. Across the whole category, May cleared a record $31.2 billion, split about 58% to Kalshi and 28% to Polymarket.

A lot of the recent run-up is World Cup froth.

Robinhood-owned Rothera have seen an explosion during the World Cup too, with 97%-99% of event contracts in June 2026 attributed to the most-watched global sporting tournament.

It's no shock that numbers like these have piqued Zuck's interest.

02 - The Regulatory Mess

Behind the numbers, the regulatory situation in the U.S. is beginning to creak, becoming fragmented and complex.

The SEC have now joined the CFTC in scrutinising prediction markets. Concurrently, the state-by-state war is ongoing, the latest of which sees the CFTC suing Kentucky, the ninth state pulled into the jurisdiction battle. Kalshi are in court with Illinois over a new tax. And a House panel have advanced a partial ban.

Every operator is now litigating its way into each new market it wants to serve. That legal overhead is a near-permanent cost at this point that these valuations gloss over, something that a consumer giant like Meta offering event contracts walks straight into, if the product has real money. Of course, this is something Meta are used to, in some respects. They recently, alongside YouTube, lost a landmark 'addiction trial' in March 2026.

[But do you know what's more addictive than social media? Gambl…. okay fine, not going there in this piece, otherwise it would be 5000 words, and who wants that.]

To add fuel to the fire, the headlines driving additional regulatory scrutiny have recently gotten uglier.

The Wall Street Journal reported in June that Polymarket ran a covert influencer campaign built on fake winnings.

The Journal reviewed 1,105 videos from ten creators tied to a Polymarket marketing contractor. Around 70% showed a bet, totalling roughly $1.9 million.

The catch? None of them were real.

118 of the videos showed creators "winning" almost $900,000. Had the bets been genuine, those same creators would have lost more than $166,000.

The fakes were staged on dummy sites built to look like Polymarket, designed to push viewers onto the real, offshore platform. The creators were mostly college-age, paid two to three thousand dollars a month, and told not to disclose the arrangement. One student posted a video of "winning" $100,000 on a bet that Trump would say the word "McDonald's" that month.

On 26 June 2026, the National Association of Consumer Advocates sued Polymarket over the campaign, alleging they deliberately targeted college students, a group with problem-gambling rates around twice that of adults. Polymarket say they are auditing their promotional content and have launched an internal investigation.

Meta have 2 billion users. And addictive game loops like Farmville were key to Facebook's success in the late 2000s. But my hunch is that Meta would not stop at gamified loops. If the numbers looked good 'on paper', why would they not turn the paid funnel on?

My colleague Simon Taylor made a sharp observation on this in Fintech Brainfood. Running Arena on fake currency is, in his words, "obviously avoiding the eye of Sauron from regulators". And Meta know that ire better than almost any other company.

However, they have not ruled out a real-money prediction market.

03 - Meta has the wrong customer

A paid product, however, might not be a sure path to revenue.

The logic is that raw distribution is the moat in this market, and Meta starts with the billions of users that Kalshi and Polymarket have spent years and fortunes chasing. On that logic, Meta would win by default, and the only real obstacle is then regulatory.

I think that logic is wrong.

The thing that decides this market is the type of customer that is being acquired, and Meta have the wrong one.

Distribution ≠ Volume

And volume is exactly what prediction markets require to drive revenues.

Most founders I have spoken to building in this market could not tell you who their actual customer is, and that includes incumbents with the biggest reach.

Breaking this down further: a prediction market is a high-volume, low-margin business. It makes a thin slice on an enormous churn of money.

Compare that to how a platform like Coinbase makes money.

Coinbase are a platform that aims to generate wealth, with high margin and lower volume, for retail customers buying crypto. Of course, there are also market makers and professional traders that use their pro terminals and APIs, but most of their customers are retail.

They can sell you Bitcoin, and take a big margin on it. And consumer transactions are 40.1% of Coinbase's revenue, per their latest SEC filings.

Prediction markets cannot replicate the big margin products that their adopters are making their money from.

A prediction market earns a thin take on each trade, and far less than that on the most liquid contracts. To build a real business on a thin take, you need volume that recurs, which means you need the same people coming back to trade again and again.

The customers who recur are the ones who are good at it, the market makers and the sharps, and they are extracting from everyone else. The customers who actually fund the thing, ordinary retail, are by definition the ones losing, and people who lose money do not come back forever. A wealth-building product aims to keep customers for a long period of time. A wealth-extraction product like a prediction market churns customers regularly.

That difference is why the distribution keeps failing to convert.

Coinbase have enormous reach and launched prediction markets, and it has not worked for them as well as they’d hoped, because you cannot take a customer who came to you to build wealth and move them into a product that is designed to extract it. Gemini, another crypto exchange, have seen similar challenges.

As I see it, here are the many different types of customers that prediction markets cater for, and these platforms do not understand the segmentation properly.

There might be more, but this is what I'm currently seeing:

Sports bettors
They want entertainment, promotions, and fast settlement. They want parlays, live betting, and yes, notifications when odds move. They want a DraftKings/Fanduel experience but better. Whether that's through incentives, better odds, or better technology.

They care about UX polish, mobile-first design, and integration with live sports data. They don't care about decentralisation or censorship resistance. Whether it's Kalshi, Polymarket or Fanduel and Draftkings, it doesn't make a huge difference to them. Whatever lets them place the bets they want to place, in the way they want to place them.
Sports traders
These folk are different. They're not there for entertainment; they're there for arbitrage and execution. They want tight spreads, deep liquidity, and API access to automate strategies across multiple platforms. They need clean order books, low latency, and minimal fees.
Financial traders
They want liquidity, tight spreads, and low fees on non-sports markets. They want order books, limit orders, and API access. They care about whether the market is deep enough to absorb size without slippage. They're trading political outcomes, economic indicators, or crypto prices.
Hedgers
They want prediction markets as risk management tools. A business owner wants to hedge against a regulatory outcome. A conference organiser wants to hedge against event cancellation. A farmer wants to hedge against the weather. These users need long-duration contracts, personalised market creation, and correlation-aware pricing.
Investors
They want something else entirely. Protection against inflation, geopolitical risk, or long-term uncertainty. They want structured products, basket exposure, and long-dated expiries. A derivative of their existing investment portfolio, or letting them go against their existing positions in the short term, while not needing to liquidate their current positions. Or perhaps they want to go long/short on a specific event without being impacted by macroeconomic factors.

Building horizontally for all of these audiences is very difficult.

And each audience needs something different.

Fundamentally, this is a product, technical and business model problem depending on who the customer is.

Let's discuss some of the problems we see in existing platforms, for example.

Kalshi began offering parlays to their customers about 9 months ago. Or, as Kalshi call them, 'Combos'.

In a traditional sportsbook, parlays are where a user picks multiple lines and wraps them into one wager at higher odds. Like a lottery ticket for sports gamblers.

It's the most popular bet type for retail bettors and the highest-margin, most profitable product that a sportsbook offers.

But this product was built for a centralised sportsbook. I can pick 10 legs and know IF I win, it is paid out.

But how does that work with event swaps?

One would think that Kalshi would take the liquidity from their book and also ask market makers to make markets for these combos.

In reality, they are shifting this liability to market makers - meaning that they 'make the markets' for these parlays.

That is fundamentally a worse product offering than a centralised sportsbook.

Kalshi, who are an 'everything prediction market', still haven't been able to crack this, and it's mostly because of the business model.

As per Legal Sports Report:

"Parlays on Kalshi have grown from a negligible share of trading activity in the fall of 2025 to more than 20% of weekly sports volume during the opening week of March Madness, marking a new high since the product launched, according to data compiled by Legal Sports Report."

On the surface, this seems pretty good.

Parlays have gone from 0% to 20% of total sports volume on Kalshi in ~6 months.

But, again, as per Legal Sports Report:

"Kalshi generates most of its revenue through transaction fees rather than hold, so parlay activity does not inherently increase margins the way it does for sportsbooks. In practice, Kalshi earns roughly the same fee — about 1% — on a trade, whether it's a parlay or a straight bet, regardless of outcome. Sportsbooks, by contrast, might hold around 5% on a straight bet and 20% or more on a parlay."

Essentially, the feature that Kalshi have built is servicing sports bettors, but not necessarily their own business model properly. Especially when you have to cut in market makers and heavily incentivise them to make the markets for parlays.

Nevertheless, volume is volume, and it's something Kalshi desperately need to keep growing to grow into their huge valuation.

But that's just one feature set of a traditional sportsbook that a prediction market is trying to replicate, and struggling to find the right business model for. The customer acquisition cost here is HIGH, and sportsbooks are making 45-65% of their revenues from parlays. The amount of money required to drive customers away from them is huge.

This is just one example of the minutiae that are required for a $40bn valuation prediction market business to be competitive with existing products. And still, it's an unideal way for them to compete, because the core primitives of event swaps are not conducive to building a very profitable parlay product.

Let alone talking about building for day traders, market makers with deep pockets, and having the infrastructure to support the likes of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, who have both indicated prediction markets are of 'interest' to them.

But even in the usual swap markets, some big market makers are getting savaged.

0xDevin on Twitter explains this below:

TL/DR → Market makers on Kalshi employ something called 'shading'. This is where market makers see retail flow going into one side of a contract, and try to make the price 'bad', removing any edge. But the market makers are getting gazumped by sharp pro sports traders and bettors.

Devin's research showed the following:

"The description circulating among prediction market traders is blunt: market makers shade the retail-heavy moneyline side to horrible odds, moving the entire market, then get picked off for millions of contracts on the other side, then shade the other side to balance inventory. They also leave millions of contracts exposed in the order book when lineups drop."

Betfair exchange solved this by giving market makers a 5-9 second delay, and taxing their top 1% of traders fairly heavily. Even Polymarket have a 3-second delay for market makers. Kalshi have no guardrails at all.

This brings us on to Robinhood.

Robinhood, like Coinbase, are a digitally native broker. One started in stocks, the other in crypto. But now, the lines are blurred. The overlap in their products is great.

But Robinhood are seeing great success in their prediction market compared to Coinbase.

Why?

Because Robinhood have captured the hearts and minds of retail traders and investors. And a subsection of them has a gambling-adjacent mindset. The GameStop saga is a good example of that. The venue with the right customer beats the venue with the most customers, every single time.

Their exchange, Rothera, a joint venture with SIG (the biggest market maker on Kalshi), is now firing on all cylinders, with every metric growing exponentially.

And no doubt, Rothera, which is part-owned by SIG, will protect the market maker with the guardrails it needs.

To summarise:

Distribution does not guarantee volume
Because there are a variety of different customer types in prediction markets
And… unless you have those customers baked into your existing platform, you will not gain traction, unless you acquire them aggressively (and expensively)
But… to have a venue with liquidity, you need to incentivise market makers heavily (because they are sometimes taking huge losses)
There are no guarantees that Meta can solve the issues for the retail or professional trader in prediction markets

04 - So why is Meta doing this?

Presumably, because they think 2bn+ customers would convert to substantial volumes. Because honestly, I don't buy that Zuck would keep this 'free' if it showed even a semblance of traction.

The Kalshi talks make more sense through that lens. The value in Kalshi is not the brand, it is the customers who already trade and the licences to serve them.

Simon also asked, in the same Brainfood piece, whether this is another distraction like VR, where Meta have spent somewhere in the region of $80bn without anything like that coming back. Maybe. Meta have also been very good at copying innovation, with Instagram taking Snapchat and TikTok's best features and monetising them effectively.

But his sharpest point was this one:

"Whether Meta's move is a folly or not is not the useful information in this story. The useful information is that prediction markets are winning the war for consumer attention, and that's something a company of this size should be paying attention to."

And Meta are the kings of funnelling attention. Their monetisation mousetrap is almost unrivalled.

But going back to my original point… Meta does not have the right customer. Facebook and Instagram are where people scroll, message and post. They are not there to take financial positions or bet, even if they are ported to a sister brand.

Let's run a thought experiment.

Picture the funnel. You are on Instagram, you see a market, you are nudged across to a real-money venue. You deposit $500. You lose $200, and never come back.

Retail loses in these markets 99.99% of the time, and retail that loses does not stay. The volume charts you see from the big venues do not capture churn. And retail churn is the hardest thing to solve for in this industry.

We have a quarter of a century of evidence for this, and it is sitting in the UK. Betfair Exchange has been running a peer-to-peer prediction market since 2000. It is a genuinely good product with tighter pricing than the bookmakers around it. Twenty-five years on, it is still a fraction of the UK betting market it was supposed to replace, because the same thing happened.

Market makers and quants set up shop, retail kept losing to them, and retail churned out, going back to traditional sportsbooks. Saving 1% on the spread did not keep ordinary punters in the seat.

This is the real unsolved problem. How do you stop retail churning out?

Until someone answers that, prediction markets do not become mass-market consumer businesses, especially not as integrated or standalone products for incumbents.

A last note, which may be underdiscussed.

Meta makes money from advertising, predominantly. Direct advertising via their platforms, using campaigns, or indirect (paid promotions from content creators) drive big money to Meta.

If Meta launch a real money prediction market, are they going to give up the advertising revenue that is being pushed in this direction?

Is that potential loss in advertiser revenue worth the 'hope' that prediction markets drive the necessary volumes, or attention that converts to volume down the line, that move the needle for Meta?

Zuck is one of the all-time great CEOs when it comes to moving his stock price up.

But even he has had huge failures, most famously with the 10s of billions lost with the metaverse, and as Simon pointed out, the distraction that is VR.

But even a company as big as Meta need to show the market they are looking for growth.

For Zuck, it seems as though AI and prediction markets are the verticals Meta will pursue in order to do that.

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Collector Crypt Hit $100M Weekly Volumes: Interview w/ CEO Tuom Holmberg

Pet Berisha — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 16:47:06 +0000

The Sporting Crypto Podcast is back! 🚨

In this episode we're joined by:

• Tuom Holmberg, Co-Founder & CEO @ Collector Crypt

We discuss:

🛣️ Collector Crypt's journey since April 2021 launch
🤔 Why tokenized collectibles achieved product market fit now
🛠️ Reducing fees and fraud in collectibles trading like stocks
🎰 Revenue model through arbitrage and vending machine buybacks
🔄 Token utility and vision as proxy for collectibles ecosystem
🚀 Launching a token requires product market fit first

Listen here 👇️

Collector Crypt Hit $100M Weekly Volumes: Interview w/ CEO Tuom Holmberg

The Sporting Crypto ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/sporting-crypto/ ) Podcast is back! In this episode we're joined by: • Tuom Holmberg ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuomas-holmberg-85480a/ ), Co-Founder & CEO @ Collector Crypt ( https://collectorc...

Sporting Crypto • Sporting Crypto

📹️ Watch on YouTube

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This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not financial, business or legal advice.These are the author’s thoughts & opinions and do not represent the opinions of any other person, business, entity or sponsor. Any companies or projects mentioned are for illustrative purposes unless specified.

The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

Rain Launch Integrated Loyalty

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 16:00:00 +0000

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If you want to get your brand in front of 5750 leaders in Blockchain & Sports, then just hit reply to this email.

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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

The Product 🎁
The Sports Roots 🏀
Loyalty as Infrastructure 🏗️
Why is this important for sports? ⚽️

The Product 🎁

Rain issues stablecoin cards for banks, fintechs and platforms, and sits as a Visa and Mastercard principal member. They claim to have over 100 partners, using their infrastructure.

Why would you want a stablecoin-linked card, you ask?

Because offramping from stablecoins to local fiat currency is still tricky. Or, you might be a contractor in Paraguay who wants to keep their earnings and savings in dollar-denominated stablecoins. Or, because there is a killer rewards program that you can’t ignore.

Cards are also compliant by default. Meaning the flow of funds from crypto → real world spending, has fewer compliance pain points for everyone in the chain.

Now, Rain have launched ‘Rewards’.

It adds the ability to integrate a loyalty layer to any card program that Rain launches with a partner. Points, earn rules, and redemption live in the same system that handles spend and settlement, so there's no second ledger to reconcile and no extra vendor to wire in. As Rain point out: “it's expensive, and stitching it together often takes months” to pull all of this together, for most businesses.

The points themselves are minted onchain only after a transaction settles, which means a reversal doesn't leave a stranded liability floating in the books. The onchain points have a name of their own, too, landing in the cardholder's wallet as ‘raindrops’.

Rain partners controls the programme. From the name, to the earn rates and the redemption, whether that's a flat rate or extra points in chosen categories. Cardholders see the partner's brand throughout and redeem within the same app, either as a statement credit or against hotels and flights in a white-labelled travel portal.

More than 90% of US credit card spending sits on rewards cards, which means that if you have a card program and don't offer rewards, you’re not competitive.

Rain ran a private beta with Avalanche Card before opening Rewards to everyone. Over 30 days, cardholders enrolled in the programme spent about 25% more per day than those who weren't, measured against their own past spending.

That is quite the needle mover.

The Sports Roots 🏀

This loyalty push comes several months after Rain acquired Uptop, who themselves saw great success in sports.

Uptop came up through sport, building onchain loyalty programmes for the Cleveland Cavaliers (Cavs Rewards), the Detroit Pistons (Pistons Rewards) and LSU Athletics.

[Here’s a rundown for the unitiated of how the Cavs Reward program works, which recently won platinum in the 360loyalty awards]

Fans sign up with an email and create a ‘Cavs ID’.

Onboarding for Cavs Rewards

After clicking ‘Get Started,’ users are walked through what they need to do to accrue points.
Fans are told they need to link a card to earn points on purchases at Cavs Rewards locations, and they can also earn additional points by scanning receipts for eligible products such as Coca-Cola, Michelob Ultra, and more.
Fans are then shown how business owners in the local area can connect with the Cavs Rewards program.
Finally, it is outlined how those points can be redeemed and what the rewards could be.

After the onboarding process, users are then prompted to connect a debit or credit card.

This is done easily through the fintech company Plaid, and after linking a card, fans are directed to the home screen.

From there, fans can click on ‘Add Points’ (1), ‘Earn Points’ (2), ‘Rewards’ (3) or (4) ‘Join as a Business’.

(1) Add Points: Allows fans to purchase points with fiat currency.
(2) Earn Points: Shows fans the different ways in which they can earn points, such as referrals, purchases and challenges.
(3) Rewards: Showcases the types of rewards fans can redeem.
(4) Join as a Business: Rerouted to a landing page from Uptop with a form to be filled out by businesses.

The model was simple for the fan. Link an existing debit or credit card, earn points on everyday spend at groceries, restaurants and partner locations, then redeem for tickets, VIP experiences and merch.

And it links to the card you already have, meaning there’s no friction of having a new card issued.

The clever part was the open loop. A team's sponsors could plug directly into the same programme, so a fan earned points for spending with sponsor brands in normal life, not only inside the arena. That gave sponsors measurable metrics, which is key.

The Cavs Rewards numbers were impressive. Sponsors saw a 21% lift in spend from enrolled members, and Team Shop sales rose 51% since launch. Rain has now taken that engine and verticalised with card issuing.

Looking elsewhere, Club Brugge, one of Belgium’s biggest football teams, has an embedded debit card which launched last year. It’s similar to the Uptop model, but with a debit card. 5000 fans requested the card on launch. There was a 13.3% increase in-stadium commissions. A 9.2% increase in fans arriving at least 30 minutes earlier on matchdays.

Club Brugge made ~$180m in revenue last year. This isn’t a massive business. The loyalty program is localised and aimed at enriching the match-going fan experience. But even without the need for global penetration, Club Brugge could still create an even more competitive, hyperlocalised rewards program,

Loyalty as Infrastructure 🏗️

The verticalisation, now that Uptop is part of Rain, means a wallet is already in place by default, so the raindrops a cardholder earns have somewhere to live without anyone needing to download anything.

Points accrue automatically with spend, are minted onchain once the transaction settles, and sit alongside the cardholder's other balances.

The really interesting thing here, however, is the shared infrastructure that Rain have built, and what they plan down the line.

They want a shared liquidity layer, so raindrops across different programmes can interoperate, rather than trapping each program’s points in its own silo. A single programme's points don't do much alone. Pooled across an ecosystem, they start to behave like a currency. Historically, big brands and airlines pre-fund card programs for multiple years to make them extremely competitive. You can only do this by placing a big burden on your liabilities(aka, you need a lot of cash).

Smaller brands could do loyalty before technically. But not commercially. And with this shared liquidity layer, there is a compounding effect.

On a recent episode of the Tokenized podcast (my other child), Ross Basri, Co-Founder of Uptop said:

"We're going to have a centralised liquidity facility for all of those tokenised points between our programs to interoperate with each other. If you're a small business and you issue an on-chain point, you may or may not be able to do a whole. But if you're part of the Rain ecosystem, there's potentially a lot more you can do with it, so that's that's in a nutshell how we're thinking about this”
Ross Basri, Tokenized Podcast

Simon Taylor, Co-Host of the Tokenized Podcast, followed this up with:

“You had big programs and big brands that were doing loyalty. Airlines would pre-fund this for multiple years, everybody would compete for that product, and it only made sense if you were massive. But the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Detroit Pistons, very different scale of business and very different scale and type of customer base, and so I think the type of hyper personalised loyalty, if you bring down that cost, is really interesting on top of all of the yield mechanics that can manifest as rewards in a way that that actually makes sense”
Simon Taylor, Tokenized Podcast

Teams and smaller businesses could not create highly competitive rewards programs. Maybe now, they can.

Why is this important for Sports? ⚽️

In mid 2024, Forrester ran a report with two incredibly interesting stats

According to their Q4 B2C Marketing CMO Pulse Survey, 2024, 67% of respondents planned to either enter the sports space for the first time or increase their investment in sports sponsorships.

Yet, 76% of U.S. B2C marketing executives who invested in sports sponsorships in 2023 agreed that they struggle to calculate the ROI of their investment.

So there was and still is an appetite to get involved in sports, but the people spending the money don’t quite know how that shows up as a return to the business.

And sports need these brands to drive revenues.

Broadcast, which is 50-80% of most sports teams’ revenues, is flattening almost everywhere apart from the NFL or greenfield sports leagues.

And whilst the case for sports as an asset class is that they are AI-proof and scarce, there still needs to be a reasonable revenue-to-value ratio for the growth to continue.

There are moves like multi-use stadia to increase revenues for teams that own their stadiums. But digital, and growing monetisation from global fanbases, is most likely where these ‘brands’ can drive further growth. And sports could, funnily enough, be incredibly well placed to move in this direction. Here is some context, from previous pieces I’ve written:

Fans are the entire revenue base, yet clubs barely know them: “They are the biggest and only revenue driver. They pay the subscriptions that pay for broadcast deals. They buy merchandise and they pay for tickets.” (Watford FC Sell 10% Stake to Fans)
Sport's real edge is passion, no other category can match: “They have passionate fanbases in the millions who want to engage with their league or team, more so than a consumer does with their favourite supermarket, coffee shop or airline.” (Commercialisation in Web3 Sports)
Today that fandom is unmeasured and monetised through a broken funnel: “My fandom isn't measurable… we are a captive audience from our relationship with a team alone, and we are exploited, but in a very fragmented, quite broken way.” (LAFC Launches Loyalty Club)
Loyalty has shifted from nice-to-have to core revenue: “For many huge brands, loyalty has become fundamental to the business model, rather than auxiliary and a ‘nice to have’.” (Ode to Odyssey)
The durable model is platforms and loyalty, not one-off drops: “Platforms, loyalty programs and engagement… is where brands are placing their bets.” (Web3 Loyalty: Buzzword or Breakthrough?)
Direct-to-fan is compelling precisely because it's global and frictionless: “selling to your fans in a frictionless, small-overhead, global way without having to ship anything physical is a very attractive proposition for someone with rights to leverage.” (Athlete-Direct-to-Fan)
And the oldest version of the case, from 2022: own your IP or your revenue model is hostage to the next deal. “If you are reliant on licenses… you have to be prepared for your business model to implode should you not get recurring deals over the line.” (To License or Not to License?)

So if the growth in digital requires knowing your fans more intimately, and globally, there also needs to be a more coherent funnel to monetise those fans. And as with every big funnel, there is a lot of leakage. That is exacerbated by having fans globally who pay in different currencies and have wildly varied spending power. But a credit card, issued physically and virtually, with competitive earn components, could be the way that teams and leagues compete. And, earn more revenue by owning more of the payments stack.

Indeed, in the same episode of Tokenized, Simon went on to say:

“I think about a consumer brand like Manchester United or Liverpool that have massive presence in Asia Pacific and Africa, hundreds of millions of people who are fans of what they do, that they have no direct way to monetise today, but could have a stablecoin-linked card, but try and launch a card program in those markets would be really, really hard. Stablecoin cards? Little bit easier to do, not completely easy, but much more cost-compressed and affordable”
Simon Taylor, Tokenized Podcast

Right now, those teams can monetise global fans through merchandise (where revenues are split with manufacturers), IP licensing (where revenues are underwritten by the licensor, and static), memberships (that haven’t changed in model since the internet began) and pre-season tours (a once-per-season event that has a cap in monetisation).

Web3 Loyalty only caught on sometimes and didn’t have enough staying power. It wasn’t as sticky as we thought. But verticalised with payments where earn and rewards are competitive, could be a huge unlock.

Sports teams and leagues are constantly looking for their next growth vertical. And for brands that have a constant flow of new customers (family/college attendance) and a massive global footprint, it’s time to move beyond primitive business models and own more of the value flow.

More Sports & Web3 Stories

OG Prediction Markets and OG Anunoby Team Up for New York Launch (Read more here)
FIFA wanted Avalanche's blockchain to help curb World Cup ticket scalping. Here's how it's going (Read more here)

General 'Stuff' that Could Impact You

Kalshi Passes $2 Billion in Annualized Revenue, Holds Informal IPO Talks (Read more here)
Coinbase launching tokenized US stocks, backed 1:1, with holders able to receive dividends (Read more here)

Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Sporting Crypto newsletter!

If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends who might be interested and share it on socials.

Disclaimers

The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

Building an Onchain Sports Exchange Ft. Amit Mahensaria

Pet Berisha — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:00:00 +0000

The Sporting Crypto Podcast is back! 🚨

In this episode we're joined by:

• Amit Mahensaria, Co-Founder & CEO @ PRED

We discuss:

❗️ Disrupting sportsbooks as middlemen via peer-to-peer exchange
📊 Why sports needs a dedicated exchange, not general prediction market
🧩 Three customer segments: occasional, frequent, and institutional traders
🗝️ Key product needs for live sports trading: speed and resolution
💰 Hedging and insurance as fringe use cases under 5%
🔎 Importance of clear rules and oracle providers for market resolution
💸 Parlays as sportsbook product with high margins not easily disrupted
🎰 Betfair comparison and why timing and DNA matter for exchanges

Listen here 👇️

Building an Onchain Sports Exchange Ft. Amit Mahensaria

The Sporting Crypto ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/sporting-crypto/ ) Podcast is back! In this episode we're joined by: • Amit Mahensaria ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/mahensaria/ ), Co-Founder & CEO @ PRED ( https://www.pred.app/ ) In this episode...

Sporting Crypto • Sporting Crypto

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This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not financial, business or legal advice.These are the author’s thoughts & opinions and do not represent the opinions of any other person, business, entity or sponsor. Any companies or projects mentioned are for illustrative purposes unless specified.

The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

Zondacrypto exchange collapses, Sports bonuses unpaid

Pet Berisha — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Over two years, Zondacrypto put its name on Atalanta, Bologna, Parma, AS Monaco, the Giro d'Italia, a women's WorldTour cycling team and the Polish Olympic Team, making it one of the most heavily branded crypto exchanges in European sport.

Today, thousands of its customers can't withdraw their money from the crypto exchange. Polish prosecutors estimate losses of at least 350 million złoty ($97 million), with roughly 1,500 criminal complaints filed.

Sport gave Zondacrypto its credibility. The badges and the Olympic branding signalled an established, serious business to ordinary savers, right up to the point the withdrawals stopped.

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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) The sports portfolio 🚴
2) Zondacrypto’s collapse 📉
3) Sponsors cut the cord 🚪

Before we get into things… you should sign up to our Prediction Markets newsletter, Predicted!

The sports portfolio 🚴

Zondacrypto spread its money across football, basketball, cycling and the Olympics.

In Italian football, they had a collaboration with Juventus, took Atalanta's first-team shirt sleeve on a multi-season deal, became Bologna's top sponsor and official crypto exchange for 2024/25, and signed Parma for the same season.

In France, they partnered AS Monaco, put its name on the club's Salon Honneur hospitality area, then added AS Monaco Basket, where its logo sat on the front of EuroLeague jerseys.

At home in Poland, Zondacrypto were prolific. Raków Częstochowa, Pogoń Szczecin, GKS Katowice, Lechia Gdańsk on a deal to 2026/27, Wieczysta Kraków, and the basketball side Dziki Warszawa were all part of their sports sponsorship portfolio.

One sport the exchange had focused on was cycling. They were the official cryptocurrency partner of the 2024 Giro d'Italia, title partner of the Canyon//SRAM women's WorldTour team from 2025 with a sleeve extension to 2028, a premium partner of the Tour de Suisse, and main sponsor of the PZU Gran Fondo amateur series.

Beyond this, there were partnerships with federations, committees and athletes themselves. In October 2025 they became the general sponsor of the Polish Olympic Committee and the Polish Olympic Team for the 2026 to 2028 cycle.

On the ambassadorial front, Wojciech Szczęsny, Giorgio Chiellini, Valtteri Bottas and Katarzyna Niewiadoma were some of the names they had secured.

Zondacrypto’s collapse 📉

The warning signs go back years.

The exchange started life in 2014 as BitBay, founded by Sylwester Suszek, and in 2019, Poland's regulator, the KNF, added BitBay to its public warning list for alleged unauthorised financial activity. The business was then sold to a US investor and rebranded as Zonda in 2021, with executive Przemysław Kral taking over.

Several months after the sale, in March 2022, Suszek disappeared after a business meeting, with his fate still unknown and still under investigation by Polish authorities. It’s alleged that the private keys to the Bitcoin held in the exchange were never actually handed over to new management. And with Suszek missing, Zondacrypto had no way to access those funds.

Fast-forward to April 2026, and the turmoil begins in very public fashion.

Customers couldn’t withdraw funds from the exchange. And following reports in the media, the board members of the Estonian operating company that Zondacrypto sits under, resigned. They all pointed to concerns regarding customer withdrawals.

An on-chain analysis by Recoveris, reported by Polish outlet money.pl, found Zondacrypto's hot wallet Bitcoin reserves had fallen 99.7%, from roughly 56 BTC in August 2024 to a fraction of a single coin by March 2026. More than $21 million across 30 cryptocurrencies left the wallets in 511 transactions between December 2025 and April 2026. Kral pointed to a cold wallet holding 4,500 BTC, worth around $330 million, as the reserve. Neither he nor the company could open it, because the keys sat with Suszek, the founder who'd been missing since 2022.

Prosecutors opened proceedings citing more than 2000 criminal complaints said:

"104 pieces of electronic equipment and over 13 terabytes of data from Zondacrypto servers were seized. Over 100 of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges were contacted to secure funds and important IT data. A European Investigation Order was filed with the Czech Republic."

The damage then spread to connected businesses, as the Zondacrypto-linked fintech Femion filed for bankruptcy after its złoty payments arm collapsed. Estonia's financial intelligence unit suspended part of the licence held by the exchange's Estonian business, and Polish Olympic athletes were left owed 1.1 million złoty ($300,000) in token-based medal rewards.

Sponsors cut the cord 🚪

Of course, when an exchange collapses in such public fashion as we’ve seen with FTX in the past, sponsors are quick to protect their image.

The Polish football clubs went first, with Dziki Warszawa terminating in April and GKS Katowice, Raków and Pogoń following within days. The Polish Olympic Committee held on at first, set a payment deadline, then took the Zondacrypto neon down from its headquarters on 30 April.

The Tour de Suisse ended their deal with immediate effect in early May, and on 29 May, Canyon//SRAM terminated its title sponsorship, citing breaches of contract, with a full rebrand due by 1 August.

It’s a story we’ve seen before, most spectacularly with FTX.

And indeed, the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK just this week warned Premier League clubs about engaging in ‘questionable’ sponsorship deals with unlicensed crypto companies. They wrote to football teams in the UK, setting out concerns “about sponsorship arrangements between football clubs and firms operating cryptocurrency exchanges or trading platforms without FCA authorisation”.

For sports teams, where there is so much pressure to drive revenue via sponsorship, I do have sympathy. Equally, especially in big, multi-year deals, due diligence is paramount, and clearly there is not enough of that happening.

More Sports & Web3 Stories

FCA warns premier league clubs about crypto sponorships in UK (Read more here)
COB and Cardano Foundation Partner (Read more here)
Sports exchange PRED opens to the public (Read more here)
OKX introduces free-to-play World Cup predictions (Read more here)
Crypto Scams Are Targeting Soccer Fans, Law Enforcement Warns (Read more here)
'Trump Coin Club' Plans Exclusive Events for Meme Coin Holders, Starting With FIFA World Cup (Read more here)

General ‘Stuff’ that Could Impact You

Coinbase Launches Pre-IPO Perps, Starting with Elon Musk's SpaceX (Read more here)

Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Sporting Crypto newsletter!

If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends who might be interested and share it on socials.

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The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

Tokenized Fan Ownership

Pet Berisha — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 16:17:38 +0000

Since I started writing Sporting Crypto, I have probably had over 30 conversations with people who want to buy sports teams, and tokenize the equity.

The Green Bay Packers for example have over 500,000 shareholders. Manchester United and Juventus are publicly traded. Germany still runs a 50+1 ownership model. Barcelona, Real Madrid and others have ‘Socios’ who vote on club presidents.

These are all varying degrees of ‘ownership’.

Blockchain, is the master of capital coordination.

And the tokenisation of real world assets has exploded.

So why hasn’t it happened to sports teams yet? And will it ever?

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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) What the Market is telling us 📊
2) Sports, the asset class 🔔
3) Why would you tokenise team equity? ⛓️
4) What is the tokenised sports market worth? 🌐
5) The hard things are still hard ⚖️

Before we get into things…

Check out our latest report on Prediction Markets below. Totally free to download! 👇️

State of Prediction Markets - Q1 2026

50-page+ deep dive on the state of predictio markets, Q1 2026.

Predicted - The Business of Prediction Markets Newsletter • Predicted

What the Market is telling us 📊

Crypto is in its real world era.

2017-2020 was the era of tokens.

2020 was the era and beginnings of DeFi.

2021 were NFTs.

But after the collapse of FTX in late 2022, crypto was desperate for the nurturing, guiding hand of an adult.

The space went back to basics.

“Let’s put dollars on a blockchain”

And since August 2023, the supply of stablecoins has doubled from $150bn to $300bn.

Source: Artemis

And this isn’t just for trading crypto tokens, which is why stablecoins first started getting popular.

Payroll, collateral, 24/7 money movement and B2B usecases have all exploded in the past 24 months.

Crypto’s first real product market fit moment beyond a store of value was here.

And if dollars can be tokenised, then why can’t everything else?

US Treasury debt, commodities, stocks, private equity and real estate — the things that drive the world economy are starting to become tokenised. The total value of non-dollar tokenisation is now over $30bn, up from $10bn at the start of 2025.

It’s a trend that is accelerating, not slowing down.

Sports, the asset class 🔔

So what about sports?

The new asset class.

Goldman Sachs, Wharton Business School, Apollo and others are telling you sports is now an asset class.

But why now?

Because humans are always, historically, driven to scarcity.

And within the context of AI accelerating abundance, simple supply and demand would dictate that things cannot be replicated. Things cannot be generated. The things that are culturally significant and embedded in the human species will become more valuable.

Indeed, NFTs were ahead of their time in trying to detach physical ownership from scarce digital assets.

But in retrospect, we needed that bridge. Where there is still something earthbound and tangible that backs a digital asset.

A microcosm of this phenomena is happening in trading cards, particularly Pokemon cards.

TCG weekly revenue on tokenised collectibles marketplaces Courtyard, Collector Crypto, Emporium and Phygitals have exploded, up to $7.5m per week, a 200% YoY increase from this time last year (May 2025).

Source: The Block via Dune

The NFT has become the digital receipt, rather than the grail or the artwork. Although I can imagine that years from now, they will be all encompassing.

But back to scarcity.

Packy McCormick, one of the inspirations for me starting a newsletter, wrote ‘Scarce Assets - The abundance-driven scarcity supercycle’— and it’s excellent.

Source: Not Boring

This chart showed that ALL of the F1 teams combined are worth a little more than half of what Cursor, the AI coding platform, is worth.

Which is bananas.

Indeed, in 2010, there was not a sports franchise on the planet worth $2bn.

Now, the top 100 are ALL worth $2bn+, worth half a trillion combined.

Why would you tokenise team equity? ⛓️

Before we discuss the potential market size, let’s discuss why you would want to tokenise the equity in a team.

Indeed, tokenising equities means that they can trade 24/7.

But sports teams are mostly private, so why would you want to tokenise them?

Instinctively, most people would answer: capital.

Sports teams always need capital.

But, equally, team owners are not short of being able to find that capital.

There is always an institutional buyer these days.

And team owners do not have 100,000 people on their cap table.

Therefore, unless there’s desperation, they do not need to sell equity to retail.

Having a digital certificate of ownership tied to your digital and physical experience of a team, however, could be a gateway into globalised loyalty solutions as we have never seen. With the chance that your stake increases in value. Crucially, that stake is scarce, and you have an emotional attachment to it. And let’s be serious, it’s about status too.

The question beckons whether you need the ownership piece to achieve some of these goals. To create a digital experience that maximises revenue.

After all, sports is a primitive business.

Arsenal Football Club make as much money annually as Klarna (~$1bn in revenue).

The unlock to achieve much higher valuations is tied to scarcity in an era of accelerated abundance, but also untapped potential.

It’s just not clear whether tokenising the equity is core, or supplementary to, doing exactly that.

What is the tokenised sports market worth? 🌐

If we presume that 20% of owners want to tokenise the equity in their teams, then the market is worth $100bn. If 25% of those 20% actually end up doing so, you end up with a market size of $5bn.

Now, of course, that market size, if looking at the valuation of sports teams, will continue to grow. But it’s quite small. Real-world assets tokenised are already at $30 billion.

One of the reasons we haven’t seen this happen yet is that the market is still small.

A $5bn TAM where you are required to 1) convince team ownership this is a good idea and 2) then sell equity to fans… is a difficult market to operate in.

It’s not that I don’t think this will happen, or that it will happen well.

But the reason it hasn’t happened to me is clear.

The TAM is too small to have massive resources allocated to it, which is what it requires to get it right.

The hard things are still hard ⚖️

Whether the equity is tokenised or not, the hard things are still hard.

Convincing team owners.

Dealing with retail stakeholders who might kick up a fuss if things don’t go their way.

Indeed, in 2024, Republic sold 10% of Watford Football Club via Seedrs, where the equity was digitised in this fashion.

Around £3m of the £17.5m stake was sold to retail. This shows how hard it is to actually drive demand.

Distribution is difficult.

Getting a stake in a team might be easier than actually getting it in front of the people who want to buy in. Especially if it isn’t a top tier IP, like Watford, for example.

So the hard thing about doing this isn’t putting the equity on a blockchain chain.

It is finding the right team.

It is distribution.

It is convincing team owners.

It is hoping against hope that having that many shareholders is not a nightmare.

More Sports & Web3 Stories

From Forbes: How OKX Scaled To The World’s Second Largest Crypto Exchange Through Sports (Read more here)
Chiliz to Launch Fan Tokens for South Africa and Scotland National Teams (Read more here)
Crypto Wealth Firm Nexo Sponsors $3 Million Golf Tournament at Trump International Scotland (Read more here)
ADI Predictstreet partners with Fanatics (Read more here)
Crypto.com and Fanatics Collectibles Partner for World-First UEFA Champions League Activation (Read more here)

General ‘Stuff’ that Could Impact You

White House starts review of CFTC's prediction markets rulemaking as Trump backs agency authority (Read more here)
Tokenized Pokémon card marketplaces hit record $7.4 million as hype peaks ahead of 30th anniversary (Read more here)

Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Sporting Crypto newsletter!

If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends who might be interested and share it on socials.

Disclaimers

The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

The Candy Digital Reboot ft. Tad Smith

Pet Berisha — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000

The Sporting Crypto Podcast is back! 🚨

In this episode we're joined by:

• Tad Smith, CEO @ Candy Digital

We discuss:

💥 Revenue model challenges and IP license costs
💸 Royalty enforcement problems on secondary markets
⛓️ Solana Metaplex Core for protocol level royalties
🔎 Primary issuance focus instead of secondary markets
💎 Non-sports digital collectibles

Listen here 👇️

The Candy Digital Reboot ft. Tad Smith

The Sporting Crypto ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/sporting-crypto/ ) Podcast is back! In this episode we're joined by: • Tad Smith ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/tad-smith-8384692b/ ), CEO @ Candy Digital ( https://www.candy.io/ ) In this episode o...

Sporting Crypto • Sporting Crypto

📹️ Watch on YouTube

Supported by Hedera Foundation

Disclaimers

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not financial, business or legal advice.These are the author’s thoughts & opinions and do not represent the opinions of any other person, business, entity or sponsor. Any companies or projects mentioned are for illustrative purposes unless specified.

The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

Fanatics Collect tap Phygitals as Onchain Collectibles Boom

Pet Berisha — Mon, 11 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

The Solana-based tokenised card marketplace Phygitals announced an integration with Fanatics Collect, the world's second-largest sports collectibles platform behind eBay.

Collectors who list a card on Phygitals can now select Fanatics Collect as an additional selling venue in one click. Phygitals went live on Fanatics with 50,000+ cards already cross-listed at launch.

This is the first time a crypto-native trading card marketplace has plugged directly into a mainstream sports collectibles platform of this scale.

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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) The Integration 🔗
2) The Market 📊
3) B2B Infrastructure 🏗️
4) Concluding Thoughts 💭

Before we get into things…

Check out our latest report on Prediction Markets below. Totally free to download! 👇️

State of Prediction Markets - Q1 2026

50-page+ deep dive on the state of predictio markets, Q1 2026.

Predicted - The Business of Prediction Markets Newsletter • Predicted

🔗 The Integration

The product integration is very simple. List once on Phygitals, sell across both marketplaces.

A collector with a vaulted card on Phygitals can now expose that listing to Fanatics Collect's buyer base without having to recreate it.

Fanatics handles regular payments in fiat
Phygitals handles the onchain side logistics
The card stays in its vault
Only the listing moves

The Fanatics Collect digital platform only launched in Summer 2024, but it’s added fuel to the fire of a monster collectibles business.

1.1 million cards were securely stored in Fanatics vault in 2025
13 cards sold for > $1m in 2025
85% US-focused
Collectibles hit $1.6bn in revenue in 2024 for Fanatics
They just announced they’re taking World Cup rights from 2031 onwards, ending Panini’s 60+ year association with the biggest tournament in sport

Phygitals has done $180 million+ in trading volume on Solana since its public beta in February 2024. The team is lean, with six or seven people and the company have not raised any external funding.

The integration sits atop a vaulting stack that the two companies already share.

Phygitals' cards are physically stored across PSA, Alt XYZ, and Fanatics' own facilities.

That existing custody overlap is what makes the cross-listing possible. The card is already inside the system.

Phygitals is also building proof of reserves with Alt XYZ, the firm that runs the dominant trading card pricing oracle. Any user will be able to view a Phygitals profile and verify the cards in vault.

📊 The Market

The onchain collectibles category has quietly become the biggest consumer crypto story outside of prediction markets.

The weekly revenue (net of buybacks) across major platforms is at all time highs, and is up 3x in the last 18 months.

Gacha spending (buying digital packs) is also at all time highs across major platforms, ~4x YoY, which is remarkable.

Weekly volumes have also become significant, seeing 3.5-4x YoY growth.

Looking at phygitals in isolation, the numbers make for interesting reading.

In Sep 2025, Phygitals saw explosive growth: $21m Volume peak / $11m Gacha peak / $1.46m Net Revenue peak, all in the week of Sep 29. This was a sharp rise following much more modest metrics in mid 2025.

Following that dip, Phygitals saw a dip in Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, before growing in linear fashion across all metrics toward the end of Q1 and Q2 2026.

Phygitals' Real Pitch: B2B Infrastructure 🏗️

The headline reads like a B2C marketplace story. The actual business is increasingly a B2B one.

Jake Vito, CEO of Phygitals, framing on the get infinity podcast was the following:

"We have a focus on the consumer side, but we're also equally focused on the B2B side, distributing our tech and everything we've built to others.”

Indeed, there is a lack of differentiation currently within the digital onchain gacha business.

As per Vito:

"These gacha platforms are pretty much commoditised. So we want to be the ones powering these platforms versus head-to-head competing."

The Fanatics integration is the most visible version of that. But the same logic is showing up across the rest of the partner stack. Phygitals is powering Anime Chain and over 30 branded pack drops from creators including Zardo Cards (the million-follower Pokémon shop), Vlog, and Nuco. Some of those drops have sold out tens of thousands of units in a single launch.

Concluding Thoughts 💭

(1) Wrapper or Business model innovation?

Until now, my feeling has been the collectibles industry has viewed tokenised trading cards as a wrapper, not as a business model innovation. I think that is a mistake. Fanatics are the first big player in this space, but are certainly not the last.

eBay and secondary marketplaces like Vinted will all be looking at this space seriously in the future

(2) Liquidity is powerful

Phygitals now has two marketplaces feeding a single book. A card listed once is exposed to both the Solana-native bid and the 140 million Fanatics customers at the same time.

For Fanatics Collect, this is a win-win. They are able to add more inventory, completely turnkey. For Phygitals, it’s a huge coup due to the credibility the Fanatics brand lends them.

(3) Secondary sales win out

Phygitals' inventory is mostly Pokémon, One Piece, and other TCG categories. The integration covers cards that Fanatics doesn't have exclusive licensing on.

Being able to monetise cards that don’t require Fanatics to fork out big licensing fees for is a higher margin product. Of course they are investing massively there, but being able to aggregate more and more inventory for your customers on the secondary market is vital to win in this game.

(4) Competition or Cooperation

When Robinhood launched prediction markets, they used Kalshi as the conduit.

They then acquired an exchange and started building out the plumbing themselves.

If this gets big enough for Fanatics Collect, I wonder whether we could see an acquisition, or them building something.

More Sports & Web3 Stories

British sprinter CJ Ujah charged over alleged involvement in cryptocurrency scam (Read more here)
Crypto sponsor Zondacrypto faces sporting fallout after Tour de Suisse exit (Read more here)
Underdog Hires Former Head of Crypto[dot]com Prediction Exchange (Read more here)

General ‘Stuff’ that Could Impact You

Kalshi Raises $1 Billion at a $22 Billion Valuation as Institutional Adoption Accelerates (Read more here)
Kraken Parent to Buy Reap Technologies for $600 Million (Read more here)

Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Sporting Crypto newsletter!

If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends who might be interested and share it on socials.

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The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.

The Investment Thesis for Sports & Blockchain Ft. Chris Cheung

Pet Berisha — Mon, 04 May 2026 17:00:00 +0000

The Sporting Crypto Podcast is back! 🚨

In this episode we're joined by:

• Chris Cheung, Partner @ TenSquared

We discuss:

✨ Sports as a fundamentally transformed asset class
🎥 Media rights increasing three to tenfold
⛹ Fans shifting from teams to individual athletes
🤖 AI making live sports experiences more valuable
💰 Monetizing the top 5-10% super fans
📱 Using QR codes and NFTs for sponsor ROI
📈 Blockchain prediction markets and on chain collectibles
🎟️ Blockchain ticketing needing financing gap solutions
🔒 Athlete IP protection using blockchain
🏛️ Netflix, Apple & Amazon changing sports broadcasting models

Listen here 👇️

The Investment Thesis for Sports & Blockchain Ft. Chris Cheung

The Sporting Crypto ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/sporting-crypto/ ) Podcast is back! In this episode we're joined by: • Chris Cheung ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophercheung93/ ), Partner @ TenSquared ( https://tensquared.com/ ) In this ep...

Sporting Crypto • Sporting Crypto

📹️ Watch on YouTube

Supported by Hedera Foundation

Disclaimers

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not financial, business or legal advice.These are the author’s thoughts & opinions and do not represent the opinions of any other person, business, entity or sponsor. Any companies or projects mentioned are for illustrative purposes unless specified.

The contents of this newsletter should not be used in any public or private domain without the express permission of the author.