TruGolf, the Nasdaq-listed golf simulator company, have bought Polymath, the team behind the Polymesh blockchain. And they plan to use it to fund simulator leasing and sell fractional stakes in their TruGolf Links franchises, from the first quarter of 2027.
The weird and wonderful world of sports and onchain assets collide again, in increasingly curious ways.
Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:
1) Who's who 👥
2) The deal ⛳
3) The $140 million 🧮
4) The PolyX token 🪙
5) TruGolf's numbers 📉
6) Tokenised franchises 🏌️
7) Concluding Analysis & Thoughts
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Who's who 👥
Like with any of these deals, there are a lot of moving parts and many companies involved. So here’s a quick breakdown so you don’t lose track. Stick with us, because this is something FC Barcelona’s accountants would be proud of.
TruGolf, an indoor golf simulator company based in Centerville, Utah. Their roots go back to Access Software, who made the Links golf video games. When Microsoft bought Access Software in August 1999, the core Links programming and graphics team were spun out into TruGolf. Today they sell launch monitors (APOGEE and LaunchBox), simulators for homes and commercial venues, and the E6 CONNECT and E6 GOLF software. They listed on Nasdaq as TRUG in January 2024 by merging with a SPAC called Deep Medicine Acquisition Corp. (A SPAC is a shell company that raises money on the stock market so it can merge with a private business and take it public.)
TruGolf Links, TruGolf's franchising arm, which sells franchises for indoor golf entertainment venues kitted out with TruGolf's products.
Polymath, founded in 2017. They created the ST-20 security token standard and contributed the ERC-1400 standard on Ethereum. (A security token is a share, bond or fund unit issued on a blockchain.) Polymath say they've issued more than $132 million of tokenised assets for more than 65 active issuers, as of the end of 2025, and their 2025 revenue was $4.2 million, with $21 million of assets.
Polymesh, Polymath's own blockchain, launched in 2021. It's public but permissioned, and built for regulated assets. In plain terms, identity checks, compliance and settlement are handled by the chain itself, and the nodes are run by licensed financial institutions. The token for the chain is PolyX.
The deal ⛳
TruGolf have bought all of Polymath, and paid for it entirely in TruGolf shares.
Polymath merged into a Canadian TruGolf subsidiary, so they're now wholly owned by TruGolf.
The two agreed the deal in August 2026, changed the payment terms in September 2026, and completed it earlier this month.
Natalie Hirsch, Polymath's interim CEO, is now TruGolf's CFO and COO, and $25,000 of her $275,000 salary is paid in PolyX.
Meanwhile, TruGolf's founder and CEO Christopher Jones left in September 2026, and chairman Brenner Adams is interim CEO. As part of his exit, Jones agreed to vote his Class B shares (which carry 25 votes each) the way the board recommends for the next year, and TruGolf will pay back a $1.44 million loan he made to the company.
Adams said at closing, “TruGolf was built on the idea that technology can open up something that used to feel exclusive. We did it for golf, and Polymath is doing it for capital markets.”
And Hirsch said at closing, “Tokenization is moving out of the pilot stage, and the institutions leading that shift need infrastructure they can trust with regulated assets... My focus now is execution: bringing more issuers and more assets onto Polymesh.”
The $140 million 🧮
TruGolf paid for Polymath with their own shares.
The headline value is $140 million. But getting to that number is much more complex than what meets the eye.
The deal treats every TruGolf share as worth $11.82.
But the day before the deal closed, TruGolf's shares were trading at $2.75, and the whole company was worth about $3.5 million on the stock market.
At that real price, the shares Polymath's owners got were worth about $32.6 million. And by Friday, with TruGolf's shares down to $1.12, they were worth about $13.3 million.
Most of the payment came as a special type of share that only turns into normal TruGolf shares once TruGolf's shareholders and Nasdaq approve it. When that happens, Polymath's old owners will own roughly 90% of TruGolf, and TruGolf's existing shareholders will be left with about a tenth of the company (before stock options and a few other investors' stakes).
The PolyX token 🪙
Polymesh has its own token, PolyX, and it has had a rough couple of years.
PolyX closed at about $0.034 on Sunday. Its highest daily close was $0.67 in March 2024, so it's down ~95% since then.
Source: CoinMarketCap
A year ago, it was around $0.086, so it has lost about 60% in the last twelve months.
All PolyX in circulation is worth about $45 million, down from about $560 million at the March 2024 peak.
That $45 million is still more than ten times what TruGolf were worth the day before the deal closed. Owning Polymath the company and holding PolyX the token are two separate things, though. The filings don't say how many PolyX tokens Polymath hold, so we don't know how much of that $45 million, if any, now sits inside TruGolf.
TruGolf's numbers 📉
TruGolf's revenue was $18.9 million in 2025, down from $21.3 million in 2024. In the second quarter of 2026, simulators brought in $2.72 million, software subscriptions $2.82 million, and franchise revenue was $75,000.
And their latest quarterly filing carries going-concern language, saying of the financing they're looking for, “no assurances can be given that such financing will be available on acceptable terms or at all.”
TruGolf have also done three reverse splits since June 2025, a 1-for-50 that same month, then a 1-for-10 in March 2026 and another 1-for-10 in September 2026.
In August 2026, Nasdaq told TruGolf their stockholders' equity of $2.06 million was below the $2.5 million minimum. Nasdaq had already previously flagged the market value of their public shares, their equity and a sub-$1 share price in 2024, and TruGolf went in front of a Nasdaq hearing panel in May 2025.
Split-adjusted, $TRUG ( 0.0% ) closed at $10.90 the day the deal was announced, and $2.56 on closing day. It’s now hovering just over $1.00.
Tokenised franchises 🏌️
So what has any of this got to do with golf?
TruGolf Links and Polymath say they're “developing an equipment leasing program funded through tokenized securities, along with fractional franchise ownership opportunities for qualified franchisees, targeted for the first quarter of 2027.”
There are two parts to that.
Equipment leasing. A franchisee leases TruGolf's simulators, and the money behind the lease comes from investors in a tokenised offering. Ben Litalien, TruGolf Links' Chief Development Officer, said “The funding for this plan will come from a tokenized offering on the Polymath platform.”
Fractional franchise ownership. Investors buy a slice of a TruGolf Links franchise. Litalien said this part is in the “beginning stages”.
TruGolf Links' regional developers in New Jersey, New York and Illinois account for commitments to more than 100 future locations.
Socios and announced tokenised sports team equity in September 2026 too, and that's still in development.
I’m a sceptic here, because I am unsure that tokenisation alone fixes business models. And if the business model was sound, TruGolf would not be doing this acquiring/merging with Polymesh.
Concluding analysis & thoughts 🧠
➡ There are so many sports tech companies, and crypto companies, public and private, that have both lost a lot of enterprise value in the post covid era. There is a mad scramble to supplement these businesses with creative financing that either keeps them going, or keeps them public.
➡ Speaking of staying public, one could argue that's exactly what TruGolf were doing here, considering they filed accounts showing they were below Nasdaq's minimum equity requirement three days before signing the Polymath deal, and then closed it three days after Nasdaq's deadline requiring a plan to make up that gap.
➡ We are in this incredibly curious environment where:
Sports financing is built on debt, and debt is getting more expensive. But not expensive enough to mess with the sports-as-an-asset-class hype train
The Private equity and credit markets are in hyperdrive
VC and investment for early-stage investments in anything outside of AI, Robotics and Prediction Markets is THIN
The crypto token market is still fairly depressed
The equities market is also fairly jittery, with geopolitics a big factor in this
So the natural thing to do is to blast a publicly traded golf simulation tech business together with a company behind a token that has lost 60% of its value in the last 12 months, and 95% from all-time highs.
➡ I’m bullish on tokenisation, but not for the sake of it. My bet is that TruGolf will use the tokenised franchises to either:
1) create new forms of collateral in crypto-native markets
or
2) globalise tokenised ownership to retail of these franchises
I don’t really think there’s a big enough market in either of these to drive substantial enterprise value for this ‘new’ TruGolf.
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