What do Johnny Manziel, Gerard Pique, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. all have in common?
From a strictly sports perspective, "Johnny Football", the Catalan soccer star, and NASCAR legend couldn't be farther apart from another. But there is an underlying thread that ties their stories together.
They were all born into wealthy families.
Of course, this doesn't discount their enormous athletic talents - the records speak for themselves on that account. But having the financial security needed to focus on sports as a full-time occupation certainly made a difference.
Not every athlete gets the magic opportunity to fund their training and participate in the competitions that earn them the titles they need to thrive. For every Lebron James or Cristiano Ronaldo - well-known for facing humble origins and hardships on their way to stardom - there are thousands of supremely athletes who simply never make it.
But what if you could invest in an athlete or a sports organization the same way you invest in the stock market?
SportyCo seeks to remedy this situation by leveraging the crowdfunding investment power of the blockchain to give people the ability to invest in athletes at the outset of their career. The decentralized cryptocurrency sport platform uses tokens to represent users' investment in the careers of the athletes they support, breaking open the high barrier to entry into the modern sports industry.
How Does SportyCo Work?
SportyCo describes its operation workflow through the use of an example case - Claire.
Claire is a promising tennis player whose professional training regimen is slated to cost almost $80,000 over the next three years. Claire agrees to make SportyCo her primary backer, allowing her to focus on training in exchange for 25 percent of her income for the next 10 years.
Through SportyCo's crowdfunding sport platform, she manages to reach her goal and, only a few short years later, reaches the Wimbledon semi-finals and is ranked in 7th place. She earns sponsorship contracts of $1.5 million per year for the next five years, entitling her investors to their share in her profits.
Importantly, the terms of Claire's participation and the agreements between her and her investors are built into a decentralized cryptocurrency system using smart contracts represented by tokens. SportyCo athletes can choose to share their future image rights, future sponsorship proceeds, commercial rights relationships, and transfer rights with investors in order to have their budding careers financed.
The smart contract system is based on the Ethereum network, giving it a robust foundation for automatically enforceable smart contracts. This makes the ICO investment more secure against fraud and wrongdoing than other crowdfunding services can be - the contract's terms and the athlete's token are essentially inseparable. There is no chance that Claire will simply decide not to pay back her sponsors.
Does It Work?
The platform on March 30th, 2018, giving potential investors the ability to buy into the value of the Ethereum-based SPF token during the ICO investment phase. This token is the medium of exchange on the SportyCo platform. It is convertible to all major fiat currencies on several popular exchanges, including Kucoin,Okex, HitBTC, LiveCoin, and EtherDelta.
It is too early to tell whether SportyCo will succeed in its mission to disrupt the world of sports financing, but the implementation of smart contracts to an industry with historically high financial barriers to entry is a promising approach.
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