LiveLike to Begin Offering Crypto Fan Tokens to Sports Industry Partners Through New

Gamification-based fan engagement startup LiveLike will begin offering crypto fan tokens to its sports industry partners through its new partnership with Chiliz, the parent company of the Socios fan token platform. LiveLike has become the first company to receive a grant to join Chiliz Chain 2.0, the new blockchain ecosystem offered by the Malta-based company.

LiveLike has previously worked with teams and leagues such as the NBA, Golden State Warriors, NASCAR, and La Liga, as well as broadcasters such as Madison Square Garden Networks, Fox Sports, Turner Sports, Canal+ and Sky Group. Trivia, polls, prediction games, watch parties and leaderboards are among the features LiveLike integrates into the apps of their partners. Fans earn points for engaging with the features, and now LiveLike can integrate Socios fan tokens to further support fan loyalty programs.

“We were going to their [Socios’s] partners independently and saying LiveLike will provide you an audience engagement platform to help create communities in your owned and operated apps, it’ll help you engage your fans better, create loyalty programs,” LiveLike CEO Miheer Walavalkar told SportTechie. “The fan token is sort of the endpoint of what that journey would have been. So this way, we sort of bring it together and go to partners together.”

Socios has made fan tokens for some of the world’s biggest soccer teams, including FC Barcelona, Arsenal, Paris Saint-Germain, AC Milan, and Juventus, in which token owners get exclusive access to rewards and in-person experiences. LiveLike’s partnership will enable the Socios fan token ecosystem to expand beyond the Socios app and directly into partnered team apps.

“The big value point for a fan token in the future isn’t just going to be determined by the size of the Socios.com platform, but the entire ecosystem of how many different areas, apps, websites, retailers, outlets — can you plug in this one single digital membership, and accrue benefits from them?” said Max Rabinovitch, chief strategy officer at Socios.

Socios also has deals with 27 NBA teams, 26 MLS clubs, 14 NFL teams, and 13 NHL teams. However, the company’s U.S. partnerships to date have mostly been held to marketing and fan rewards programs that don’t yet involve fan tokens.

“[In the U.S.] it’s almost a very binary experience where it’s either a yes or no to team level, league level tokenization,” Rabinovitch said. “You don’t get to go piecemeal the way we did in Europe where you can go to just Barcelona, you can go to just PSG. You don’t have to ask permission from their respective leagues in order to do something with the team.”