Luke Ryan – the head of content at Coin Jar, a cryptocurrency exchange in Australia – says that the more sports teams seek to gain crypto sponsorships, the more legitimate the space will become.
Luke Ryan on Sports and Crypto
Coin Jar is one of the first crypto companies in Australia to sponsor a sports team. By collaborating with the Melbourne Demons in May of 2021, it looks like the firm was the first company of its kind to take over an Australian Football League (AFL) club. At a recent convention, Ryan talked about how sports and crypto go hand in hand, and he discussed how both worlds could help one another. He stated:
There’s a declaration of intent by the industry, not about ‘we sponsor this team, and then we got X number of new users.’ It’s more about we sponsor this team because we want to show the world [that] we’re companies with consequences, with plans and long-term visions, and a way of showing that is to align ourselves with a presence.
Ryan commented that one of the big advantages for crypto companies that team up with sports groups is that they garner more users and higher rates of adoption. He said that Coin Jar initially got involved with the Melbourne team because executives knew the partnership would present positive promotion opportunities for the platform and its corresponding asset.
He stated:
It’s a real ongoing question for cryptocurrency. How do we move out from this five to ten percent that we now talk to, to the 20 to 50 percent? We’ve started to think a bit more about what it might look like to start getting more actively involved in sponsorship.
The goal was to also help many of the Melbourne team members learn more about crypto so they could get involved in investing and boost their portfolios. The AFL sold its first non-fungible token (NFT) collection in August. The entire collection was sold out over the course of just 12 hours and garnered more than $130,000 for the team.
Indeed, digital currencies and sports appear to be getting closer and closer with each passing day. Among the big sponsorships and hookups that we’ve seen in the digital currency and sports worlds as of late is one involving Tom Brady – the all-star Patriots quarterback – and FTX, the Bahamas-based digital currency exchange run by billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.
These Kinds of Partnerships Are Becoming Quite Common
Not long ago, Brady was seen in a television commercial for the exchange making fun of the mining process. Brady has also served as a brand ambassador for the company over the past year.
We have also seen many instances of sports stars seeking to get paid in digital currency, a trend that was arguably started by former Carolina Panthers player Russell Okung.
