Fans of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings will now be rewarded with a blockchain-based token if they demonstrate sufficient “engagement.”
The “Kings Token” was developed by crypto startup Blockparty, and is exchangeable for a host of delightful perks, among them “unique events, signed merchandise or courtside tickets,” according to Coindesk, which broke the news of the blessed thing.
It will also reportedly function within a “predictive gaming platform” that the company hopes will roll out by the time California has legalized sports betting.
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If you like sports, you probably have some strong opinions about your favorite teams or players. Now, you can get paid in crypto for putting them on the Internet. SportsCastr—a streaming platform backed by a who’s who of professional sports stars, including Super Bowl champion Vernon Davis and former NBA Commissioner David Stern—allows ordinary Internet users to commentate on live sporting events. Today, the company launched FanChain, an Ethereum-based platform designed to reward sports fans wit...
The Sacramento Kings are based some 90 miles northeast of San Francisco, and have been taking Bitcoin as payment for tickets since 2014. Their latest token is an ERC20, the Ethereum token standard that became the go-to in the 2017 ICO boom. Sacramento fans will be able to download it onto a digital wallet integrated with a thing called the “Golden 1 Center app,” which reportedly “tracks the engagement and accumulated points of fans.”
Whether the gambit will work is uncertain; the road to questionable fan-service tokenization is already paved with noble failures. Just last week, the Nets’ Spencer Dinwiddie was rebuffed after announcing, to much fanfare, that fans would be able to buy token-based shares in his $35 million contract. And we’d prefer not to ask how effective Bitcoin SV-backer Calvin Ayre’s weird and disturbing sponsorship of Ayr United was in boosting that club’s fortunes, but, judging by recent price movements, we’ll assume not very.
But at least the Kings Token is sanctioned by Sacramento management itself, meaning at worst it’ll just be utterly, hatefully unused.
