Fan Tokens Go Primetime as Chiliz CEO appears on FOX Business

College football is back and this season promises to have an additional frisson of excitement thanks to the debut of Fan Tokens. A segment that aired on FOX Business on Friday highlighted how Maryland would be “one of five college teams getting into the crypto space,” with Business Correspondent Darren Bothelo noting that they would be joining Penn State, LSU, Texas A&M, and Michigan State in partnership with Socios.com.

Bothelo went on to explain how the initiative will give fans access to exclusive perks including priority tickets and voting on promotions, with some of the revenue generated helping student athletes through NIL funds. Then it was the turn of Alex Dreyfus, Founder and CEO of Chiliz, on whose blockchain the tokens will run, to explain the bull case for Fan Tokens.

“The biggest point of doing blockchain [for Fan Tokens] is the transparency and voting,” began Drefyus, elaborating on “the fact that when fans decide they want to have this jersey next season or that music in the stadium…that’s all onchain.” He also mentioned the ability for fans to determine the jersey number assigned to new players as being among the many novel use cases that tokenization supports.

College Football Does Digital

For an asset class that began life far removed from the heartlands of American college football, an appearance on one of the country’s major business networks is another sign of how far Fan Tokens have traveled. The timing of the FOX Business segment is telling, arriving as Chiliz and Socios.com prepare for their most significant push into the US market to date.

The Socios.com agreement with five university athletic programs – Louisiana State University (LSU), the University of Maryland, Michigan State University, Penn State University, and Texas A&M University – was revealed back in July. Now, the season’s poised to go live and analysts won’t just be appraising the fortunes of the teams on the turf: they’ll also be assessing the performance of the first five’s Fan Tokens.

Already there are signs that further college teams will be entering the fray, with Socios.com promising in a tweet published on September 28 that when it comes to college football, “we’re only just getting started.” Needless to say the fortunes of the initial quintet of college tokens will serve as a bellwether that may dictate the speed with which other teams join the party.

Crypto Goes to College

To the uninitiated, college football might seem a niche sporting vertical to get the tokenization treatment. But drill into it and the sector appears ripe for extending fandom into the digital domain. College sport occupies a peculiar position in American culture, combining the tribal loyalty of professional sport with deep institutional and geographical ties.

The stadiums are huge (Penn State’s Beaver Stadium accommodates more than 100,000 supporters, as do Kyle Field at Texas A&M and Tiger Stadium at LSU), and so is the fanbase which extends far beyond the state lines of the respective sides. The audience already exists, in other words; the challenge is finding new ways for it to participate, and this is where Fan Tokens come into play.

What Will College Fan Tokens Actually Do?

While Fan Tokens may be new to college football, they’ve already proven that they have product-market fit in other major sports, particularly soccer, as the Americans like to call it. Dozens of soccer sides across Europe and South America especially have already bitten the bullet as part of their efforts to turbocharge fan engagement.

Operating as blockchain-based digital assets, the primary purpose of Fan Tokens is their utility rather than simply transferring value. Yes, their value changes and can exhibit tight or loose correlation with the performance of the team whose name they bear, but ostensibly they are digital keys that unlock access for their holders. 

As Chiliz’ Alex Dreyfus noted on Fox Business, Fan Token® holders can participate in official polls, while other use cases include gamified challenges and exclusive access to tickets, merch, rewards, and experiences. It’s up to each college team to tailor their Fan Token® to suit the interests of their supporters.

With Dreyfus explaining Fan Tokens to a mainstream FOX Business audience rather than a blockchain conference, the crypto conversation is no longer taking place solely within Web3. Instead, Fan Tokens are moving onto a much bigger field where the stakes, for supporters and athletes alike, couldn’t be higher.