Socios boss’ goal? To knock crypto out of the park – Cointelegraph Magazine

What is a sports fan’s dream come true? To be the announcer at an AC Milan home game, in front of 75,000 roaring Rossoneri fans?

To play a football match on the hallowed turf of your beloved FC Barcelona?

To tour the garage of an F1 team pre-race, then watch the Monza Grand Prix from a VIP box?

These are some of the biggest rewards handed out as incentives to join Chiliz, or CHZ-based, fan token schemes on Socios.com. There are also lesser, but still desirable prizes, like meeting your sports idols, choosing the music to be played when your team scores a goal, or voting on the design of next year’s team strip.

Socios.com has now partnered with over 170 sporting clubs across 25 countries and 10 sports, including American football, soccer, basketball, cricket, esports, ice hockey, mixed martial arts, motorsports, tennis and rugby. Eighty of these organizations have already launched their official fan tokens on the Socios.com app, and it has high-profile deals with giants, such as Manchester City, Barcelona and the Aston Martin F1 Team. 

The team captain behind this is Socios CEO Alex Dreyfus. “I’m French, 45 years old right now. And I’ve been an internet entrepreneur for the last 25 years. I left school before [I was] 18 years old. I created my first company in 1995 at the beginning of the internet. I’m the generation of the Web 1.0. So, for the last 25 years, my journey always has been to try to use the technology to create something that does not exist and try to embrace it before the others.”

He started by developing a French city guide that first covered Paris, then 36 other French cities. A serial entrepreneur, he moved on to an online gaming project, with sports betting and online poker. While there are fewer regulations in France, unlike in the United Kingdom, there aren’t betting shops everywhere. He moved to Malta 17 years ago and, 10 years ago, cashed out his betting ventures to raise capital for his next project.

Amusingly, he started out as a Bitcoin skeptic. Coming from the highly regulated world of online gambling, he had difficulty wrapping his thoughts around a decentralized system with no supervisory body.

Bitcoin skeptic… at first

In Iceland for his honeymoon, Dreyfus came across a shop that took Bitcoin, which sparked something in the back of his mind. When he came home, he found the gaming space was full of crypto enthusiasts making money. “I saw my Twitter feeds – all of my friends trading crypto, talking about it.”

“And so, in 2017, I spent a lot of time to educate myself.” He followed Andreas Antonopoulos and some other crypto influencers.

“As an entrepreneur, I always try to find new opportunities — not as an investment but to develop. At the end of 2017, I started to look at crypto from a sports angle.”

An idea was percolating in his mind. Sports are global — an international language. This means many, if not most, supporters don’t live in the originating country. According to one survey, there are 253 million Manchester United soccer fans in China or nearly four times the entire population of the United Kingdom! 

To be sure, sports like F1 travel the world with races in different countries, but to attend sports like American Football, soccer or the National Basketball Association, you usually need to be in the host country.

Yet these worldwide fans are devoted to their teams, too, which is a huge base for a business.

Dreyfus notes that sports was ripe for disruption.

“The industry hasn’t been disrupted for the last 30 or 40 years, unlike most of any other industry in the world. Travel booking, dating, of course, taxis, banking — they have all been more or less disrupted. Sports is still the same pretty much it was years ago. Management of these global brands can be quite risk-averse.”

Fan tokens are a way to create a new revenue stream for the many supporters who live abroad.

“On Jan. 6, 2018, I decided to come back to the office after Christmas and say, ‘Let’s do it. We are launching our business in that space.’ And at that time, we are 10, maybe 12, employees. It was a leap of faith,” he says.

“Fast forward to today, we are 300 employees in nine offices in the world. We are the biggest company in the blockchain/sports sector, but we are also…