Decentralised Sports

With all the developments in blockchain technology, it is amazing to see different sectors in our society make use of it. Blockchain and CryptoCurrencies are radically changing the FinTech landscape, opening doors for other industries to also benefit from this technology.The world of sports, health and nutrition generates billions of data points everyday.

Blockchain in Sports Industry

There’s little doubt now that blockchain technology will change a number of industries, with all the hype around the technology. Sports might seem to be one of the unlikeliest industries to be disrupted by blockchain, yet it seems perfectly possible if you factor in the opportunities that blockchain presents to crowdfunding. Blockchain offers an unprecedented level of transparency for transactions: you don’t need to rely on a middleman to make sure that a certain transaction took place and was processed correctly. This allows creating a decentralized system that makes crowdfunding easier. So much so that sports players, especially young athletes, will be able to boost their careers by getting public support — and their growing professionalism will in turn bring in more and more money.

Existing Problems that can be solved

Anti-doping measures

Many scandals have broke in recent years regarding this subject. During the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, hackers made several files public about doping cases in the U.S team including highly regarded and performing athletes.

The blockchain is an opportunity not only for the protection of these files being leaked to the public but for the fairness in the sports world ensuring that the own federations don’t manipulate data to hide doping cases.

Using blockchain, a more structured system for recording prescriptions and test results could be considered the answer because once the data is in the system its veracity will be checked according to preset protocols before being definitely logged into the blockchain and making it impossible to alter.

Athletes’ performance metrics and statistics

The world of sports produces an unimaginable amount of data which has yet to be used to its full potential. Performance metrics of athletes can be incredibly beneficial for the set up of coaching and training plans helping sportsmen and women achieve better results by understanding their capabilities.

Blockchain can serve as a reliable data bank of biometric measurements and race data collected from trusted devices and logged directly into ledgers.

Tokenization Will Fuel Interest in Sports

As the sports cryptocurrency market gets bigger, there will be more and more people willing to invest. They will want to invest wisely, so they will follow sports news to get insights and predict cryptocurrency value fluctuations. Instead of the Financial Times, people will be looking through sports media and watching big events. The coin exchange rate will go up or down when there is news or even gossip about a new contract, a trauma, a marriage or a breakup with a celebrity, retirement, you name it. The growing audience will further boost the sports market.

Sports Betting Could Influence the Blockchain Market After Recent Ruling

Sports betting may become a new growth industry for blockchain businesses after the U.S. Supreme Court’s May 14decision. A report by Bloomberg Law explained that the distributed ledger technology could bring efficiency to manual procedures in place within casinos to verify identities and flag problematic transactions, to tracking payouts, anti-money laundering compliance, and taxes. Matt Corva, counsel for ConsenSys, said to Bloomberg, “A betting business built on blockchain technology might assuage some of the historical concerns held by people about sports betting in the U.S., such as the threat of collusion, money laundering, and tax evasion, all of which would be more easily identifiable and enforceable against with a trustworthy shared ledger and the robust identity frameworks blockchain can provide.

Presently, there exists centralised betting service providers consisting of large-scale betting establishments that hold licenses in countries which are friendly to betting activities, and many underground betting companies. However, there are still many problems in operation and trading:

• First of all, there are regional restrictions. The regulation of currencies by various countries has resulted in the inability to support global betting payments. l
• Second place, there are trust issues with payments. Users’ trust in claim payments depends only on the trustworthiness of the banker and the platform, especially when there is a risk at the complex and long-term payment and delivery.
• Odds and changes in handicap are not transparent. Betting rules, betting, information concerning betting outcomes are not open and transparent. For dealers there is room for fraud and misconduct.
• In the third place, inability to pay immediately. With the development of time and the change of odds, bettors can choose to cash in advance, but the existing centralised mechanism can only rely on dealers’ limited repurchase.
• Last but not the least, there are also privacy and security protection. There is risk in users’ privacy and financial security.

Prediction and entertainment platform

All Sports Prediction and Entertainment Platform is a set of ecosystem services built on the All Sports Platform, public blockchain and SOC. It provides the world with underlying and basic technical services for sports prediction and entertainment. The market volume or user base for sports prediction is very large, which provides a strong economic base and broad application prospects for this service.

Fan Engagement

Businesses need customers to make money. Fans are needed to monetise sports. Fans who watch games on television and various other platforms, spend money on merchandise, and buy tickets to matches, will boost advertising revenues and TV rights.

Sports clubs have embraced the utilization of social media for harnessing the engagement of fans, but blockchain technology could take this one step ahead. Sports clubs can introduce their own virtual tokens/currencies specific to the club which the fans could spend on merchandise, tickets, and food and beverages at matches.

This leads to operational efficiencies which means more profit for the clubs. The system could enable peer-to-peer ticket exchange which can be popular among fans and enable the ticket re-sales market to be fairly administered between fans and clubs as well as avoid dealing with fake-ticket market.

Loyalty schemes run by blockchain are being explored in other sectors and organizations and sporting clubs could also get benefited from this technology to engage fans all over the world.

The Decentralised Sports Industry

Activity & Performance

• DYNO: Re-Defining the sports industry by building the first blockchain based marketplace for user driven sports and metabolic data. DYNO started with their own analytical devices and will open the DYNO ecosystem to all third-party tracking and fitness devices.
• Lympo: Lympo aspires to revolutionise the healthy lifestyle ecosystem through monetisation of user-generated data via blockchain to reward users by offering incentives and supplementing health insurance to inspire a healthy society.
• Playtness: Playtness is tokenizing the world of fitness by creating an ecosystem for its members, powered by smart contracts. Using the Playtness platform and its built-in reward mechanisms, the fitness industry is able to interact and transact in a way that creates incentives for its users through the use of PT tokens.
• Ufity: Ufity motivates to exercise more. Run, work out, walk, move and convert effort into Fitys, the internal (soon crypto) currency to purchase various offers.

Management & Organisation

• Globatalent: Globatalent is the blockchain decentralization platform which allows clubs and players to attain funding by selling future revenue rights to fans worldwide. The investment process is automated with the help of Smart Contracts that use Blockchain Technology. This ensures token trading in a fast, secure way.
• Inoovi: platform powered by the famous Blockchain that prides itself as a way to support all next Football Players Champions transfers and supporters experiences.
• LFE: First fully integrated football club stock exchange and fan marketplace harnessing the power of the blockchain. The LFE’s technology will create a tokenised marketplace which will remove friction costs and increase transparency in transactions in the fan marketplace such as ticketing, merchandise, hospitality, broadcast and football retail services.
• Peerspoint: Peerspoint is using blockchain technology to ensure personal ownership and validation of sport data as well as allow access to a global ecosystem of peers and benefits. Their ecosystem will deliver a tangible sum of benefits attached to their LaaS: Players, Clubs, Coaches, Medical Staff, Volunteers, Leagues, Federations, Sponsors, Parents, Family, Friends, Fans, Intermediaries and more.
• Sports Technology Group: STG future-proofs sports teams, organizations, and leagues by building their entire technology stack on blockchain technology. From internal operations to fan experiences and engagement, the ultimate goal is to ensure that data will be able to speak to each other, so that every future investment will work seamlessly together in real-time.
• SportyCo: SportyCo is introducing a brand new industry of sports crowd micro-financing while providing athletes, clubs, and sports organizations with macro-funding on their respective end. Moreover, SportyCo is enabling a direct financial link between the participants on both respective ends. Blockchain-based, low in transaction costs, introducing smart contracts into the world of sport, as well as the use of DAO voting, will be the key elements.

Media & Fans

• Fan360: The first sports community for fans, that covers the complete fan experience. Fans can follow their favourite sports star, club or brand and get rewarded for every action on the platform. Each like, share or content contribution is rewarded with FAN tokens. Fans collect them through a transparent bIockchain system, and can exchange them for special experience, merchandise, tickets or fiat money.
• Fanchain: FanChain provides a framework in which fans are rewarded with a token that can be used within the sports ecosystem to which they contribute, and creates a feedback loop that incentivizes the community to contribute to the social conversation that they rely on for an optimal sports experience. FanChain introduces the concept of “Mints,” which allow third-party entities to distribute FanChain tokens that are stamped with a specific sports team, league or event.
• Jetcoin: The main role of the Jetcoin Institute is to empower individuals in three major fields — sports, entertainment and media through digital asset based tools. The Jetcoin Institute is establishing new channels of interaction between fans and athletes. At the heart of the Institute is its crypto-currency, the Jetcoin. Fans invest Jetcoins in their favorite champions and stand to gain from the success of their Champions.
• Scorum: Scorum provides cryptocurrency rewards for both content creators and curators. Community members get paid for publishing posts, voting, commenting and uploading photos. For sports writers we have developed custom solutions: sports analytics, interactive graphics and other great tools.
• SportCo: Provides multiple ways for fans who contribute to content creation, knowledge share and building of communities to be rewarded. SPORTCO coin aims to be the preferred currency of choice across the global sports world and uses blockchain to decentralise and provide specific tools for analytic overlays, gaming, and online media experience.
• Stargraph: An App that allows to receive authentic and personalized Stargraph autographs if you participate in major events such as concerts, matches, Formula1 and MotoGP races. Exclusive assets with real value backed by Blockchain technology.
• TokenStars: TokenStars is the first celebrity management platform on the blockchain, providing advanced tools and incentives for deeper interaction between stars, fans, and advertisers. As a utility token, TEAM will be used in most of the interaction activities powered by the TokenStars platform, including providing incentives to fans and external agents for finding promising talents (scouts), making betting bids, and so on.

Games & Bets

• BetOnChart: Bet on Chart is a unique platform combining highly profitable in-play sports betting with the dynamics of a live match. Modern technologies and the latest advancements in the field of AI allow us to recreate a football match in the form of a chart that moves up or down depending on the current field situation.
• DreamTeam: DreamTeam is an infrastructure platform and payment gateway for esports and gaming. As an all-in-one platform, DreamTeam will securely connect all gamers, teams, sponsors, advertisers and tournaments; enabling mutual economic transactions within one global esports ecosystem.
• FansUnite: FansUnite is created by bettors, for bettors, and was founded with the mission to improve conditions for sports bettors everywhere. We are revolutionizing the sports betting industry by harnessing the power of blockchain technology to provide cheaper, more secure, verifiable and transparent betting.
• Footballcoin: Footballcoin is a football manager game platform using blockchain technology and issuing an own cryptocurrency (XFC) with the mission is to bring the advantages of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies to Football Manager and Fantasy Sports users.
• Ronaldinho Soccer Coin: The NEO blockchain based coin is aiming at various use cases, such as eSports, Betting and others.
• Socios: Will offer the world’s first scalable, tokenized voting platform where fans can buy, trade & execute voting or ‘crowd managers’ rights in their favorite football teams. Powered by by the chiliZ fintech platform & $CHZ token.

Blockchain technology can guarantee prediction participants (wallet address), prediction rules, betting, results and other information will be set out in an open, transparent and tamper-proof manner. It is envisaged that all Sports public blockchain would completely erase obsolete bad habits such as cheating, fraud, etc., as well as allegations faced by innocent online prediction platforms and the dealers.
Such is the significance of blockchain technology and its potential opportunities in the sports industry. In the future, the blockchain opportunities for the sporting world look promising though it is yet to reach its full potential. Those who want to stay ahead of the game in the sporting world should embrace the innovative opportunities blockchain has to offer.

Please leave a comment if you think we missed out any particular opportunity or product in the decentralised sports industry.