- SL Benfica, a Portuguese football club, has teamed up with Utrust to enable crypto payments
- Fans can now buy tickets and merchandise with crypto on their official website
The intersection between the worlds of sports and cryptocurrency has occurred a number of times in the past such as in the case of the Litecoin foundation sponsoring a UFC match as well as an Italian football club launching their own crypto. It is one of the less reported aspects of adoption but is significant nonetheless as it exposes crypto to a brand new audience and also highlights the fact that there is some overlap between sports fans and crypto users.
Now fans of the Portuguese Sports Club SL Benfica will be able to buy merchandise and tickets while making use of cryptocurrency, as reported on June 6, 2019.
Crypto Comes to Football
This new development is as a result of a partnership between SL Benfica and Utrust, a cryptocurrency service firm, which will provide the new payment option on their website. This includes the purchasing of tickets to games and products on the website such as official sports merchandise. The purchases will be done through the use of Utrust’s official token, the UTK token, as well as any of the top cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether.
A major advantage for the team is the fact that Utrust supports crypto-to-fiat conversions which means SL Benfica can get its revenue directly in fiat form. This will also help them to get around the issue of crypto volatility while still using blockchain to ensure secure transactions from customers.
These customers are quite many as SL Benfica has over seven million active followers on their various social media platforms and is believed that they have twice that number of fans worldwide. They aim to increase their following with this new development and have promoted this as the cheapest and fastest method for online transactions.
The management of SL Benfica has also expressed excitement at this new development and believe it is going to be well received.
“We recognize that many of our supporters are now digital users first, so we want to be ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting novel technologies and giving our supporters the best online experience,” SL Benfica CEO Domingos Soares de Oliveira said.
This is yet another coup for the crypto community which is consistently finding new ways through which the technology can be applied, even within the world of sports.
