{"id":36844,"date":"2022-12-01T23:19:21","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T23:19:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/egrowonline.com\/?p=36844"},"modified":"2022-12-01T23:19:21","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T23:19:21","slug":"socios-boss-goal-to-knock-crypto-out-of-the-park-cointelegraph-magazine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/?p=36844","title":{"rendered":"Socios boss\u2019 goal? To knock crypto out of the park \u2013 Cointelegraph Magazine"},"content":{"rendered":"


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What is a sports fan\u2019s dream come true? To be the announcer at an AC Milan home game, in front of 75,000 roaring Rossoneri fans?<\/p>\n

To play a football match on the hallowed turf of your beloved FC Barcelona?<\/p>\n

To tour the garage of an F1 team pre-race, then watch the Monza Grand Prix from a VIP box?<\/p>\n

These are some of the biggest rewards handed out as incentives to join Chiliz, or CHZ-based, fan token schemes on Socios.com. There are also lesser, but still desirable prizes, like meeting your sports idols, choosing the music to be played when your team scores a goal, or voting on the design of next year\u2019s team strip.<\/p>\n

Socios.com has now partnered with over 170 sporting clubs across 25 countries and 10 sports, including American football, soccer, basketball, cricket, esports, ice hockey, mixed martial arts, motorsports, tennis and rugby. Eighty of these organizations have already launched their official fan tokens on the Socios.com app, and it has high-profile deals with giants, such as Manchester City, Barcelona and the Aston Martin F1 Team.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Alex\"Alex
Alex Dreyfus chats with Magazine from his office. Source: Julian Jackson<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The team captain behind this is Socios CEO Alex Dreyfus. \u201cI\u2019m French, 45 years old right now. And I\u2019ve been an internet entrepreneur for the last 25 years. I left school before [I was] 18 years old. I created my first company in 1995 at the beginning of the internet. I\u2019m the generation of the Web 1.0. So, for the last 25 years, my journey always has been to try to use the technology to create something that does not exist and try to embrace it before the others.\u201d<\/p>\n

He started by developing a French city guide that first covered Paris, then 36 other French cities. A serial entrepreneur, he moved on to an online gaming project, with sports betting and online poker. While there are fewer regulations in France, unlike in the United Kingdom, there aren\u2019t betting shops everywhere. He moved to Malta 17 years ago and, 10 years ago, cashed out his betting ventures to raise capital for his next project.<\/p>\n

Amusingly, he started out as a Bitcoin skeptic. Coming from the highly regulated world of online gambling, he had difficulty wrapping his thoughts around a decentralized system with no supervisory body.<\/p>\n

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Bitcoin skeptic\u2026 at first<\/h2>\n

In Iceland for his honeymoon, Dreyfus came across a shop that took Bitcoin, which sparked something in the back of his mind. When he came home, he found the gaming space was full of crypto enthusiasts making money. \u201cI saw my Twitter feeds \u2013 all of my friends trading crypto, talking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so, in 2017, I spent a lot of time to educate myself.\u201d He followed Andreas Antonopoulos and some other crypto influencers.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs an entrepreneur, I always try to find new opportunities \u2014 not as an investment but to develop. At the end of 2017, I started to look at crypto from a sports angle.\u201d<\/p>\n

An idea was percolating in his mind. Sports are global \u2014 an international language. This means many, if not most, supporters don\u2019t live in the originating country. According to one survey<\/a>, there are 253 million Manchester United soccer fans in China or nearly four times the entire population of the United Kingdom!\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Alex\"Alex
Alex Dreyfus dreamed up fan tokens as a way to engage with a team\u2019s global fanbase.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To be sure, sports like F1 travel the world with races in different countries, but to attend sports like American Football, soccer or the National Basketball Association, you usually need to be in the host country.<\/p>\n

Yet these worldwide fans are devoted to their teams, too, which is a huge base for a business.<\/p>\n

Dreyfus notes that sports was ripe for disruption.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe industry hasn\u2019t been disrupted for the last 30 or 40 years, unlike most of any other industry in the world. Travel booking, dating, of course, taxis, banking \u2014 they have all been more or less disrupted. Sports is still the same pretty much it was years ago. Management of these global brands can be quite risk-averse.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fan tokens are a way to create a new revenue stream for the many supporters who live abroad.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn Jan. 6, 2018, I decided to come back to the office after Christmas and say, \u2018Let\u2019s do it. We are launching our business in that space.\u2019 And at that time, we are 10, maybe 12, employees. It was a leap of faith,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cFast forward to today, we are 300 employees in nine offices in the world. We are the biggest company in the blockchain\/sports sector, but we are also one of the biggest mainstream blockchain products that is not an exchange or wallet. We created the concept of fan tokens.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Essentially Chiliz (CHZ) is the entry point, allowing fans to go onto socios.com and buy tokens for their favorite National Basketball League, Formula 1, rugby or other sports team. It is just like trading on any ordinary crypto exchange, except the token\u2019s main utility is \u2014 theoretically, at least \u2014 to allow fans to have deeper engagement with their favorite club. The utility tokens are primarily a social investment, not a financial one.<\/p>\n

\"Meet\"Meet
Fans meet international soccer stars Rafa M\u00e1rquez and Javier Zanetti. Source: Socios<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Leveling up the fan experience<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Fan tokens enable fans to vote or participate in decisions to do with their team \u2014 e.g., to choose the music played when a goal is scored, scarf designs or the number a player will wear.<\/p>\n

There is a certain similarity to DAOs: where everyone with the token has input into governance for decisions that matter to them. Dreyfus describes this as a share of governance, not ownership \u2013 a kind of sports influencer. It\u2019s making fans more a participant than a passive spectator. Their top prize for soccer\/football fans is Living the Dream, where fan tokenholders get to play soccer in their team\u2019s colors on the home stadium with a star player, photographers and commentator \u2014 the full works.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had to define this experience in one word, it would be: spectacular.\u201d Barcelona soccer BAR fan tokenholder on playing on her team\u2019s pitch with fellow fans and Spanish La Liga\u2019s top player, Samuel Eto\u2019o.<\/p>\n

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Just as Chiliz and Socios were starting to take off, COVID-19 hit, and clubs had to ponder what their businesses were going to do when the stadiums were empty. So, fan tokens made a lot more sense at that point.<\/p>\n

Strangely, first COVID-19 and the current crypto winter have worked to the advantage of Socios. Dreyfus feels that the contraction of the crypto sector is removing some of the more impractical projects, but fan tokens, with their global base in sports lovers, will be able to continue to develop without distractions.<\/p>\n

However, the World Cup has not worked in its favor so far as many expected, and the token actually fell in the first week.<\/p>\n

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