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Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

Kansas Athletics announced a multi-year partnership with Ripple on 8 July, making XRP the official cryptocurrency of Kansas Athletics. The logo will appear on the uniforms of every one of their teams, across their venues and on their digital properties.

It is the first time a crypto brand has been stitched onto the jerseys of a major college athletics programme.

Ripple will fund financial and technology education programmes for KU student-athletes, covering traditional finance and digital assets, and will expand their talent pipeline connecting Kansas graduates to careers in tech.

Kansas AD Travis Goff said the deal "reflects a shared commitment to innovation and excellence".

Bill Self, their Hall of Fame basketball coach, went further: "It's a critical time in college athletics to be bold, and that's what is being accomplished."

There is a personal thread running through this one. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse is a KU alumnus and former student body president, and has called watching Jayhawks games a "guilty pleasure".

His framing of the deal was the most honest part of the announcement: "With the lawsuit behind us, now is the time to remind people what makes XRP unique, useful and worth paying attention to."

Interestingly, Ripple, parent company and issuer of XRP, is not named as the sponsor - XRP the cryptocurrency is.

I remember 2 years ago speaking with a head of partnerships at a major US sports team who told me that they “couldn’t even get near” having an actual cryptocurrency as the sponsor, and would have to settle for the foundation issuer in most cases.

Here are a few things that made this possible.

The first is the NCAA. In January 2026 they ruled that Division I teams can display corporate logos on jerseys from August 2026. The Big 12 moved immediately, unveiling a conference-wide Monster Energy patch deal worth around $20 million per year, roughly $1 million per school.

Kansas announced the Ripple deal one day later. And because the Monster agreement only locks up the energy drink category, every school is free to sell its own patch to anyone else.

The second is the House settlement. Since July 2025, schools can pay athletes directly, capped at roughly $20.5 million per school in year one and climbing to a projected $32.9 million by 2034-35.

On top of that, the NCAA and its conferences owe $2.8 billion in back pay to former athletes, spread over ten years.

Athletic departments have to find that money from somewhere.

Thirdly… Ripple settled a lawsuit with the SEC.

The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, alleging XRP was an unregistered security. The case ended in August 2025, with Ripple paying a $125 million penalty and the courts leaving intact a ruling that XRP sold on exchanges is not a security.

And that fight nearly ended the company. Speaking at the KU School of Business last week, Garlinghouse revealed that he and co-founder Chris Larsen seriously considered winding Ripple down and handing their XRP to shareholders pro rata, rather than fight a government with "infinite power and resources". The battle cost Ripple around $150 million over four years.

He said: "I'm glad in retrospect, but that was not obvious at the time."

These three things combined are why college sports are suddenly opening their doors to crypto sponsors and partners.

Kansas Athletics and Ripple are not alone here.

A month ago, on 2 June, Southern Methodist University launched the 'SMU Mustang Coin' with Krida, a Dallas-based startup founded by an SMU finance graduate. It was billed as the first officially sanctioned fan coin in US college athletics.

The official pitch is utility. Fans earn and redeem coins for priority event access, behind-the-scenes content and experiences with brand partners. The launch material is explicit that the coin is not a security, not an investment contract and not a financial instrument.

This is how it is outlined:

"This isn't just a coin. It's a new relationship between universities and the communities that already love them."

And reading Krida’s own website…

kridacoin.com tells fans to "trade them in a dynamic marketplace", to "stay on top of live price charts" and to "monitor real-time trading volume". It describes Krida Coins as "the official digital asset class for colleges, sports teams, and professional organisations".

We have seen this product before. Socios brought fan tokens to European football from 2019, with the same pitch. Vote on club polls, unlock perks, feel closer to your team.

What fans actually did was trade them, and most fan tokens sit deep in the red from their 2021 peaks. It never became more than a sponsorship asset wrapped into a speculative crypto asset.

Krida is that model, transplanted into college sports, where a large chunk of the fanbase is under 21. And honestly, any marketing materials that start with “this isn’t just a coin”, is something I’d be incredibly sceptical of.

Professional teams inherit their fans. You support who your family supports, or whoever is closest to your postcode, and a club's intake of new fans is slower, generational and incumbent on star power.

College sports have a conveyor belt.

Every autumn, a new class of students arrives on campus and becomes the fanbase. Four years later they graduate, and the fandom goes with them for life. As I wrote when LSU became the first college programme to launch an onchain loyalty scheme in 2025, the fandom is intrinsic to your identity in the formative years of adulthood.

The creators of the LSU programme are Uptop, acquired by Rain. Uptop’s CEO John Timoney Gomez said this to me when I interviewed him for that piece:

"You get a new batch of fans every year. New fans are minted when they show up at the school every year, and the alumni base is incredibly loyal, and they become fans for life."

In the same conversation, he described power-conference athletics as "the scale of the pro game, without question in many cases bigger".

No other sports property gets guaranteed delivery of thousands of new fans every single year, plus an alumni base that stays loyal for decades.

And that is why Ripple want in. Their focus has been institutional, like all other blockchains, in order to generate activity. But the majority of token holders are still retail investors, and they are heavily incenticised to increase their retail footprint.

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