This year’s first of March will be marked as another point in the cryptocurrency’s list of conquers. This time basketball gets to touch the future as the Sacramento Kings NBA team announced this Thursday that they are willing to accept Bitcoin.
The best thing about it is that fans will not only be able to buy T-shirts, mugs, basketballs and other promotional stuff related to their favorite team but also ticket for the games.
The platform that was chosen to support the digital currency transactions for the team merchandise is BitPay. Seems like the Bitcoin’s PayPal is getting pretty popular among the big players, as BitPay has already lassoed Zynga (or the other way around, depends where you are looking from) earlier this month.
BitPay’s CEO, Tony Gallapi also sees this alliance as an important step for both sides, calling this an “intersection of sports and technology”. And again as with Zynga the process is simplified so any person, so that even those not in good terms with ever-evolving tech would be able to pay for the game with cryptocurrency both from the net and in-person.
The Sacramento Kings have to thank their new owner for the teams proclaimed connection to crypto. Vivek Ranadivé took over the team in second quarter of the 2013. As the CEO of a company that specializes in real-time computing he brings the spirit of innovation into any enterprise he leads and basketball team not being an exception.
Vivek’s fixation is to provide those devoted to Sacramento Kings with something that they have never considered in the context of basketball.
“With BitPay, we are able to implement a technology that allows our fans to make Kings-related purchases without physically reaching into their wallets. A major tenet of the NBA 3.0 philosophy is about utilizing technology for the betterment of the fan experience, and this is yet another step in that process”
The team has been formed about 90 years ago under the name of Rochester Seagrams. After decades of permutations to the team composition, name and location they arrived at Sacramento California being the only members of Major professional North American sports leagues there.