NBA team Sacramento Kings is planning to launch crypto tokens as fan rewards on October 25th. The tokens are in the ERC-20 format, the most popular format for tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, and can be stored in a token wallet on the Golden 1 Center app. The app tracks fan engagement and points and offers an assortment of services, such as ordering food within the arena and purchasing merchandise and memorabilia.
The Kings’ tokens are being developed in partnership with Blockparty, a token development firm focused on events. Blockparty envisages the partnership as an event experience that could serve as a pilot for future partnerships with other NBA teams. Vladislav Ginzburg, Blockparty’s chief development officer, told Coindesk the introduction of tokens was a “mass adoption story”. “Forty-one games of 20,000 people – I’m going to go ahead and say that many of those people don’t own any crypto whatsoever. Suddenly by downloading the Golden 1 Center app, they are going to have an ERC-20 wallet with an ERC-20 token,” he said.
According to the Coindesk report, fans will not be able to exchange the tokens for fiat currency and will not be provided with a private key to access their tokens. This means that legal ownership of the tokens rests with the Sacramento Kings and fans will have no recourse to their funds, if the tokens are hacked or lost due to some reason. Fans will also be able to use the tokens only within the confines of the Kings arena in Sacramento.
The Sacramento Kings have been pioneers in cryptocurrencies. They were the first NBA team to accept bitcoin as payment in its arena in 2014 and established an ether crypto mining program called MiningForGood last year. It remains to be seen whether blockchain, which is the fairy dust solution to all of humanity’s problems, can work its magic on the Kings. The NBA team has not won a playoff season series since 2004 and their last championship title came in 1985. A recent ESPN survey found that Sacramento Kings fans are the most miserable in all of professional sports.