Sweet Launch SCOR Token to Reward Sports Fans on Telegram

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What is SCOR?  🤔 

SCOR is an ecosystem token that rewards sports fans through gaming experiences, launched by Sweet, partners of both MLS & NHL. It is supported by the SCOR Foundation, and integrated across Sweet’s ecosystem.

The ecosystem rewards program centres around mini-games on the messaging application Telegram. Players log in to complete quests and streaks, and play games — earning ‘Gems’ — which can then be converted into SCOR when the token launches.

The token can unlock:

• In-app upgrades and collectibles

• Premium content and merch

• Real life experiences (e.g. tickets)

• Exclusive drops

The games so far are retro sports-style games, accessed via the Sweet Telegram channel.

No sign-up is required as users are already logged into their Telegram account. Much like Facebook in the late 2000s, gaming has become huge for Telegram.

Telegram Gaming’s Rapid Rise 📱

Telegram has almost 1 billion users, and according to stats from late 2024, 20% of them play games. This makes Telegram the 8th most popular social application on the planet, behind TikTok with 1.67 billion users in 5th and Instagram with 2.35 billion in 4th. Meta’s Facebook takes the top spot with over 3 billion users.

100 million of the users on Telegram are based in India, with Russia, Indonesia and Brazil combining for another 100 million users. In comparison, the U.S. has 26.85m users.

Telegram launched their own blockchain in 2018, called TON, raising $1.7 billion from the public at the time in one of the biggest ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) ever. This was barred by the SEC, with the money returned to investors and $18.5 million paid by Telegram as a fine.

At the time it was known as the ‘Telegram Open Network’ — which has since rebranded to ‘The Open Network’, with a separate foundation operating the network as a decentralised, open-source blockchain.

In September 2023, Telegram endorsed TON — saying the chain and token would be its ‘official Web3 infrastructure’.

In early 2025 however, Telegram decided that the TON blockchain would be its ‘exclusive’ blockchain infrastructure provider, meaning developers who had created games on other networks and utilised Telegram’s distribution, would have to migrate to their native blockchain.

This sparked some uproar in Web3 circles, citing the ‘closed’ nature of the tie-up — mirroring many ‘Web2’ type deals.

And whilst boasting huge user numbers, according to a report from Helika, gaming retention rates on Telegram “hovered at 5–20%, far below traditional gaming benchmarks of 20% to 30%”.

To summarise:

• Telegram had a choppy introduction to the blockchain world but have circumvented this by decentralising the technology, and then having an exclusive tie-up in 2025 when regulation became ‘kinder’.

• They are the 8th most popular social platform on the planet.

• 20% of their 900m users play games on Telegram.

• Retention rates on Telegram games are markedly lower than traditional gaming benchmarks.

Analysis & Concluding Thoughts 🧠

Telegram has become one of the biggest gateways into consumer-facing crypto over the last 18 months.

The ability to natively earn and transfer tokens, and play games within a messaging service has made it a unique way for operators in the Web3 space to create products that they can then distribute natively inside a messaging service that already has a billion users.

Sweet launching SCOR is a big moment, partially because they have official licensing deals with major IPs such as NHL and MLS. The reason is; that it’s fairly untapped in sports.

Earlier this year, we saw Mythical Games announce the launch of Football Rivals on Telegram, where you can play with officially licensed cards from NFL Rivals in a Telegram mini app to earn tokens. Beyond that, there hasn’t been much in the way of games that are built for sports fans, and it’s a matter of time before this changes. Even if the games on the messaging giant have lower retention, the audience size makes it too big to ignore.

As Tom Mizzone, CEO puts it; “Sweet’s partnerships with major pro sports organizations put us in a strong position to onboard sports fans into the broader digital economy and drive crypto adoption”.

Games like ‘Hamster Kombat’, for example, hit 100 million users in 73 days and 239 million users in 81 days, from launch respectively. The gameplay is pretty strange—you play as a bald hamster who's been named the boss of a crypto exchange. The gameplay, like the statistics, are absurd— but shows how explosive the growth can be in this sub-market of gaming. And this is a game with no IP or existing audience previously.

The likes of Sweet, and many others, must be looking at this and saying, "Well, what if we actually had official licenses integrated into these games?"

The one thing that I worry about when I look at games or ecosystem tokens is tokenomics.

You almost always end up in a situation where sinks within the ecosystem have to be excellent to maintain supply and demand.

We've seen this multiple times with games or consumer crypto applications, where the native token continues to go down, even though the user metrics, and even sometimes the revenue metrics for the protocol, game or application in question do well.

With SCOR having a play-to-earn system to begin with, there is often more sell pressure than buy pressure in these models, because users don't typically buy the token. They earn it, and you require a smart system that persuades users to use the token rather than sell it. Counterintuitively, the higher the token goes in terms of price, the more difficult it is to convince consumers to use the token rather than sell it for real dollars.

Mizzone says that the “integration of $SCOR into Sweet is much broader than a play-to-earn model” and that many token launches “miss the mark as it relates to providing meaningful use-cases of the token within the greater ecosystem”

And because these games are global, we've seen with the likes of Axie Infinity, STEPN and such that have reached high prices — the token becoming a certain price may seem big for some users in emerging markets compared to the Western world.

More broadly speaking, gaming tokens are hurting in the market badly. Indeed top gaming or gaming-related tokens in the 12-month period from Jan 24 - Jan 25, have mostly performed poorly.

As we’ve covered in Sporting Crypto extensively, there are four key issues with consumer-facing tokens:

1. VCs & Investors sell tokens to the demand of retail users early in a company’s life cycle. This doesn’t happen in traditional markets until IPOs or rarely in secondaries during funding rounds.
 
2. Having a free market, 24-7-365 economy where you can trade tokens even if you don’t interact with the game/application the token is attached to. Conversely to the open, 24/7 nature of crypto - games can be hurt by traders and market makers on third-party exchanges that don’t use the game.
 
3. Token sinks in the game/application need to be matched by incentivising speculators and investors not to sell out of the game/application. As mentioned prior, the higher the token goes, the more difficult this is to do.
 
4. When you launch a token, if it’s attached to a game/application, it becomes your product. Everything you do in your roadmap is then dedicated to ensuring the token goes up or at worst sideways. This is difficult to wrestle with for entrepreneurs in this space, but I’m hopeful we see some interesting, novel tokenomic models in the next few years.

This is a bold move by Sweet and one that seeks to build on their existing model of taking IP and putting it onchain, by adding a mainstream distribution channel in Telegram, paired with an ecosystem token to fuel the growth of their next chapter.

How much traction SCOR gets, and how many ecosystem partners and IPs it manages to engage will be fascinating to follow. They are well positioned considering their history in the sports market, crypto native experience and also being first movers in the Telegram gaming market from a sports perspective.

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