Fans of Italian professional soccer club Juventus have used the Socios platform to vote on the song to be played when they score a goal in their home stadium.
The voting marked the first-ever poll held on Socios, a tokenized fan-voting platform for sports, and a real use-case of the team’s branded token JUV, according to a Jan. 6 blog post. Following the poll initiated in December, fans have chosen Song 2 by Blur as the new song which will play at Juventus’ Allianz Stadium every time the team scores a goal.
Giving a voice to fans around the world
The blog noted an effective inclusion of the poll participants, with thousands of fans from around the world taking part in the voting. Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO of Socios, spoke with Cointelegraph on the event’s significance in the history of utility tokens, saying:
"Till now most of the utility tokens we've seen were about protocol and layers. There were about blockchain itself. For one of the first time, you can see the utility of a blockchain-based asset that is used in real life by real people. It is very early stage and that was a debut but it happened. We use blockchain for 2 reasons. One is creating a limited amount of ‘Fan Tokens’ which are fungible tokens (ERC20 on Chiliz Proof of Authority chain for now) that give a voice to fans all over the world, but also we use blockchain for the fairness and transparency of the vote.”
Plans for further expansion
Dreyfus revealed that Socios — which runs on the Chiliz blockchain using its native CHZ token — is preparing to run similar polls with other soccer clubs, including Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Galatasaray, West Ham, and AS Roma, in the next few weeks. Also, Socios will expand the token voting option to esports teams.
When asked what it means for the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology, Dreyfus stipulated that real mainstream utility tokens are far from the narrative of Bitcoin (BTC) and payments. “This is the usage of blockchain for something that is not payments, and that was conceived exclusively because of blockchain. We are not replacing something that was existing before, we have created a new usage and innovation (fan token, influence, etc ...) and we use blockchain to support it,” Dreyfus said.
Tokenizing sports
Juventus’s branded token had gone through a year-long development before it was officially released on Dec. 2, 2019. The token’s initial price was 2 euros ($2.22 at the time) per token, while a limited amount of free tokens were set to be available through the augmented reality feature of the Socios.com app, "Token Hunt."
Last October, the Sacramento Kings NBA basketball team partnered with CryptoKaiju to launch crypto-collectibles. Each collectible is backed by a non-fungible token, meaning that no two are the same.
As Cointelegraph reported in September 2018, French soccer club Paris Saint-Germain partnered with Socios.com to also launch a token ecosystem.