Cristiano Ronaldo has entered a multi-year joint marketing agreement with crypto company Binance. As a part of the deal announced today, multiple Ronaldo NFT collections will be produced in each year of the deal and released exclusively on the Binance NFT marketplace.
āTogether weāll give you the opportunity to own an iconic piece of sports history,ā Ronaldo wrote in an announcement post Thursday.
Ronaldoās first NFTs for Binance are expected to go on sale later this year.Ā NFTs are blockchain-based tokens that show ownership over digital or physical assets.
āMy relationship with the fans is very important to me, so the idea of bringing unprecedented experiences and access through this NFT platform is something that I wanted to be a part of,ā Ronaldo said in a statement.Ā
Ronaldo is the most-followed person on Instagram, with 459 million followers. He grew to global fame playing professional soccer, is a five-time FIFA player of the year, and has scored over 770 goals in his career. Heās also a billionaire and is just 37 years old.Ā
Partnerships analytics firm Zoomph shared that Ronaldoās Twitter and Instagram posts announcing the Binance news saw over 48 million impressions in one hour.Ā
Fan response to the news was largely positive, though a few naysayers responded to the news by calling NFTs āscammyā and āworthless crap.ā
Binance declined Decrypt's request for comment on deal specifics.
Ronaldoās Binance deal comes just a few weeks after the company announced it was sponsoring musician The Weekndās upcoming world tour, making it āCrypto-Poweredā along with an NFT collection and a $2 million donation to The Weekndās XO Humanitarian Fund under the UN World Food Program.
Ironically, all these celebrity deals come as Binance CEO Changpeng āCZā Zhao tweeted a week ago that his company had passed on expensive sponsorship opportunities like āSuper Bowl adsā and āstadium naming rights,ā which allowed Binance to keep hiring amid the crypto bear market and a rash of corporate layoffs.
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