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Intro Notes, Plugs & Amendments 🔌🔧

🚨🔌 Today’s Sporting Crypto is brought to you by FlipFam! 🔌🚨Before we get into things, this is the first edition of Sporting Crypto brought to you by the FlipFam app! Users play prediction games in a Tinder-like swiping fashion where the best performers win NFTs! It's free to play and you can win some pretty cool NFTs by some awesome designers. 

For sports brands, this presents an opportunity to engage fans in a non-financialised way. There's no need to buy NFTs or a token and there's nothing to trade unless winners of these NFTs want to try and sell them on a secondary market. This is a lightweight way to introduce your audience to web3. They're launching soon and are run by a great group of people. Check them out in the link below! Hopefully, they are the first in a new wave of sports crypto projects that actually try and engage fans in a novel and new way.

Check FlipFam out here!

🔌 Floorcast Ep 5 is live!

🔌 If you're interested in sponsoring the newsletter - feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Story of the week

The Super Bowl goes Crypto Crazy

There was a lot of hype around the Super Bowl being a huge moment for Crypto and NFTs specifically in 2022. There were a lot of rumours flying around about what would happen and how it could be a big 'mainstream’ moment for NFTs especially. Would there be NFTs galore during the half time show?Would Coinbase finally announce their NFT platform start date?The world is watching.

Almost 100 million people tuned in to watch.Now is your time…So what actually happened?

This thread by Jack Niewold lists all the ads involved, but let’s dissect a few of them.

Crypto.com x LeBron James

First up, let’s look at Crypto.com’s ‘Fortune Favours the Brave’ campaign.

LeBron James, who has already partnered with Crypto.com to help kids learn about web3 and blockchain technology, was part of an advert with that very crypto exchange.

It features James talking to his teenage self about going to the NBA, taking us back to 2003.

There’s something about how a lot of Web3 and NFTs are playing on the nostalgia of people. And whilst there was nothing overtly ‘crypto’ about the ad, its lack of ‘hard selling’ does just show how mainstream crypto is right now.

Meta Quest 2

The older kids who are trying to stay cool.

Meta, formerly Facebook, were out there shilling Quest.

The advert isn’t awful, but it does imply, in a way, that the ‘virtual world’ that Meta are building - is better than your life. I actually didn’t hate it, but I can see why many might have.

I can say for certain, the products that Meta currently have out there from a VR perspective are not going to whisk anyone away from their daily lives just yet. In the future, perhaps, VR may become an escape from the norm just how video games, music and sports have been for many growing up. But right now, we’re far away.

I mean, just have a look at some of the YouTube comments…

FTX x Larry David

My personal favourite. FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, went for a satirical spin taking Larry David back in time to some of civilization’s most important moments that include the wheel, the fork, the toilet, democracy, the lightbulb, space travel, portable music - all of which Larry dismisses with a “Meeeh, don’t think so”At the end, he’s presented with FTX - the ‘safe & easy way to get into Crypto’ to which he responds “Meeeh, don’t think so. And I’m not usually wrong about this stuff”. It’s a subtweet to naysayers of crypto - and this time with social media - receipts are being kept, I think.

Coinbase QR Code breaks the internet

This Coinbase ad made their website crash.

Yep, a floating QR code. 

It’s part of their ‘Less talk, more Bitcoin’ campaign - and it certainly made waves.

New users could claim $15 worth of free Bitcoin by going via the QR code - and were also entered into a $3m giveaway.

Their site got so much traffic, it crashed Coinbase.

As Jack says below, this may seem funny - but I can bet you marketing teams internally at Coinbase are high fiving all round.

Their app, also went up 184 places up to 2nd, on the app store, showing just how good an investment that $14m worth of airtime was for the crypto giant.

The $40bn+ goliath have partnerships with the NBA, WNBA and many more - but this was arguably their biggest splash into sports just because of how many eyes were glued to TVs at the time.

Something tells me this isn’t the last time we’ll see a QR code on a TV screen in a promotional instance…especially when you see stats like the one below. Coinbase drove 20 million visits in a single minute to their site.

That’s mind boggling.

Money well spent?

The normalisation of crypto is important to crypto companies. And for apps that are being built on blockchains that will create genuinely better user experiences…and for pretty much anyone working on something that has anything to do with crypto or blockchain.

And the pioneers in this space; Coinbase, FTX, Crypto.com - at least from a growth perspective - need to lead the way.

The genie has left the bottle, and it’s not coming back.

But that genie is definitely being looked at with rose tinted glassed by many, and being tarred by an unfair brush by equal amounts of people. So it’s important that crypto as a community of people, plays its part in telling their side of the story.

Crypto is not going away. 

There was more venture funding in Q1 2021 than there was in the entirety of 2020.

In Q4 2020 there was over $10bn worth of funding in crytpo/blockchain ventures. So maybe the amount of ads weren’t necessarily a legitimisation activity - but more of a reflection of VC money being spent aggressively, in order to grow and generate returns for them. It’ll be a good day when writing about crypto entities sponsoring sports events won’t be seen as a novelty or a thing to write about, more a norm that we see with anything else.

More big sports crypto stories & things to put on your radar

• Jadon Sancho dips into the Metaverse? *shrug*

• Espanyol partner with Fayre on Web3 adoption

• Crypto.com have been named the official title partner of the Formula 1 race in Miami

• Luna x Washington Nationals of the MLB 

• CO92 are a DAO that are trying to ‘change the game’. Gary Neville and Peter Lim’s son are both founders

• Florida State Softball sign NIL agreement with FTX

Great reads, great tweeting and more general ‘stuff’

• Is Crypto bros a generalisation now? 

• NFTs aren’t perfect, stop looking at the here and now

• All of these companies are hiring for crypto jobs. This isn’t going away. 

• I mean, again, this crypto thing is here to stay whether you like it or not. 

• I mean journalism has never ever been in a worse state, so why not Binance?

Thanks!

Thanks for reading the latest edition of the Sporting Crypto newsletter. I’m really happy to see so many people enjoying it and sharing it with their networks. If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends who might be interested - and share it on social :)