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NBA's Detroit Pistons Launch Onchain Loyalty Program
The NBA Team are UpTop's second partnership, and the waitlist to join is now open. It comes after strong success with the Cleveland Cavaliers on 'Cavs Rewards'.
Pet Berisha
July 14, 2025
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NBA's Detroit Pistons Launch Onchain Loyalty Program
Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:
UpTop’s NBA Expansion 🏀
Success of the Cleveland Cavs Rewards Program 📱
Analysis & Concluding Thoughts 🧠
👉️ If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to our Gaming sister brand Gaming Crypto here! 👈️
UpTop's NBA Expansion 🏀
The Detroit Pistons have announced a partnership with UpTop to launch a comprehensive fan rewards programme, marking the fan engagement company’s second NBA collaboration following their successful program with the Cleveland Cavaliers, ‘Cavs Rewards’.
The Detroit Pistons’ Rewards program is called ‘Pistons Rewards’ and will officially launch in October in conjunction with the Detroit Pistons’ first home game.
It will allow fans to earn “Pistons points” from transactions like grocery stores, restaurants, and more. Once fans have earned points, they can be redeemed for exclusive team prizes, such as VIP experiences, tickets, merchandise, and memorabilia.
Success of the Cleveland Cavs Rewards Program 📱
UpTop power onchain loyalty programmes for sports teams, with the blockchain element of the technology largely invisible to the user.
Their in-market example of this is the successful ‘Cavs Rewards’ program.
It is a free-to-join program where fans can earn ‘Cavs points’.
These points can be earned by connecting a debit or credit card of your choice and using that connected card in the following ways:
In-Store Purchases: Fans can shop at any participating partner location.
Online Purchases: Fans can shop online at partner websites.
Select In-Venue Purchases: Purchases made at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (Cavaliers Home Arena). This includes concessions and bars in the arena and Centre Court, the Cavaliers team shop.
Specific Products: Fans can earn points by purchasing eligible consumer packaged goods.
Fans can then redeem these points for rewards such as game day tickets, exclusive VIP experiences, team merchandise, memorabilia and digital badges.
The sign-up flow is simple and standalone from the rest of the Cavs ecosystem (for now).
After signing up with an email and creating a ‘Cavs ID’, the onboarding flow for Cavs Rewards is very straightforward and is seamless on a mobile browser.
Onboarding for Cavs Rewards
After clicking ‘Get Started’ users are walked through what they need to do to accrue points.
Fans are told they need to connect a card to earn points on purchases at Cavs Rewards locations, and they can also earn additional points by scanning receipts showing proof of purchase of eligible products such as Coca-Cola, Michelob Ultra, and more.
Fans are then shown how business owners in the local area can connect with the Cavs Rewards program.
Finally, it is outlined how those points can be redeemed and what the rewards could be.
After the onboarding process, users are then prompted to connect a debit or credit card.
This is done easily through the fintech company Plaid, and after linking a card, fans are directed to the home screen.
From there, fans can click on ‘Add Points’ (1), ‘Earn Points’ (2), ‘Rewards’ (3) or (4) ‘Join as a Business’.
(1) Add Points: Allows fans to purchase points with fiat currency.
(2) Earn Points: Shows fans the different ways in which they can earn points, such as referrals, purchases and challenges.
(3) Rewards: Showcases the types of rewards fans can redeem.
(4) Join as a Business: Rerouted to a landing page from Uptop with a form to be filled out by businesses.
It’s very straightforward and has led to some fantastic results for UpTop and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Here’s the data since their launch:
21,000+ members
$8.5m spent at partners
> $1m in incremental spend
21% sponsor spend lift
1600 rewards redeemed
4.2m enrolled transactions
51% boost in team shop sales from enrolled members
In the interview on Sporting Crypto’s podcast, he said:
"We're seeing double digit, sometimes north of 20% increases in fealty to the brand that is an earning brand. If you're earning points towards your favourite team and they're on either side of the street, which one are you going to go to?"
Timoney went on to say the crux of their strategy is to “make the pie of value bigger for reaching your fans in an owned way", adding that "The Cavs are excited about it. They expect it to be a seven-figure revenue channel."
Not only has this been a commercial success, but a data and marketing one as well.
The Cavaliers' consented user base has grown by 50% through the programme, expanding from approximately 40,000 to 60,000 fans available for direct marketing communications.
Analysis 🧠
The UpTop model has so far succeeded because it meets fans where they already are rather than forcing them into unfamiliar blockchain-enabled experiences.
By integrating with existing spending patterns through connected payment cards, the platform removes the friction that has plagued countless Web3 fan engagement initiatives.
This proves the thesis that successful onchain adoption often requires hiding the complexity rather than celebrating it and making it obtrusive.
The approach stands in contrast to projects that require fans to purchase crypto, manage private keys, or understand token economics before participating.
Instead, UpTop leverages blockchain infrastructure to enhance familiar loyalty programme mechanics whilst maintaining traditional payment experiences that fans already trust and understand.
UpTop’s approach to the consumer is one thing, but how they built Cavs Rewards is also fascinating.
It was a collaborative approach to product development. Rather than building in isolation and seeking adoption afterwards, the platform was co-designed directly with Cavaliers stakeholders to address specific business challenges.
"They very much co-built what this product is," Timoney explains about the Cavaliers relationship.
"They were almost like on our scrum meetings... we had involvement from their digital and product folks, huge shout out to them, just almost daily in the sort of tighter periods of the launch, and even still, weekly now."
This enabled UpTop to achieve product-market fit with a proven customer before attempting to scale across additional franchises.
All of this, of course, is done to create a more robust digital identity for fans who can’t make it to the stadium, whilst showing a franchise that it is worthwhile financially for them.
As Timoney puts it:
"Look at any NBA team and their follower count on Instagram versus their capacity in the arena, and then much less than the capacity is the season ticket member base. You're just not getting the long tail of fans.
99% of a person's life is outside of the stadium, and 99% of it is outside of the confines of an interaction with a team. How do you take this and bring it to the world outside, bring it to the long tail of fans, and also make it a play for rights holders to monetise?"
Concluding Thoughts 💭
(1) Teams care about revenue; they don't care about technology. Sports franchises evaluate blockchain initiatives based on commercial outcomes rather than technological novelty, rightly or wrongly. UpTop’s approach has checked that box, whilst also generating some powerful data-led insights that will get any CMO excited.
Dan Lefton, Chief Revenue Officer at the Detroit Pistons, said in interviews regarding their new rewards program:
“At our core, we’re in the memory-making business — and Pistons Rewards is another way we’re delivering unforgettable moments to our fans.”
(2) Fan loyalty programmes don't need to exist, but they can increase revenue for teams and partners. The Cleveland metrics prove that well-designed loyalty programmes create genuine commercial value through increased partner spending, fan database growth, and merchandise sales.
(3) Fan loyalty programmes need to plug into existing behaviours. UpTop's success comes from enhancing familiar spending patterns rather than requiring fans to learn new technologies or change fundamental behaviours. By connecting existing payment methods to team-specific rewards, the platform creates value without friction.
(4) When blockchain is useful, it's really useful. The UpTop model demonstrates blockchain's value in specific applications—identity management, programmable rewards, and interoperable loyalty systems—without forcing any additional facets of blockchain technology onto the consumer.
(5) With that in mind, UpTop do plan to go more ‘onchain’.
As Timoney says, "I think, further down the line, (we could create) a real fan graph that's more open, rather than permissioned, maybe we open things up to other developers who can leverage our data, or reach our fans with different offers and just make it a completely modular solution.”
For UpTop, the balance between closed-loop systems for their partners like the Cavs and Pistons, and opening up their stack and infrastructure to create something more open-source and powerful will be pivotal going forward.
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