English Football Club West Ham United to Create Fan Token via chiliZ’s Socios Blockchain Platform

West Ham United, a London-based soccer club which plays on the English Premier League, has decided to enter the crypto world. The team has partnered with Socios.com in order to launch a fan token, which was revealed in a press release today, April 30.

According to the official reports, Socios.om, which is a tokenized voting platform for mobile apps focused on sports, will be important in the launch of the token as it will develop all the tech behind it. Socios is owned by ChiliZ, a sports blockchain platform that had the investment of important players like OK Blockchain Capital and even the crypto exchange Binance.

At the time of this report, West Ham is the 11th ranked team of the Premier League during a good season for the club, which is not one of the giants of the league, despite being a very traditional team.

The West Ham Fan Tokens

The so-called Fan Token Offering (FTO) will happen at the start of the next Premier League season (2019/20). The team affirmed that the new token will be a digital asset and that holders will get to have voting rights on a fan platform that will be used to drive fan engagement up.

By using these tokens, the soccer club also intends to offer rewards, games and merchandise on its site, too, and users may receive discounts for using the tokens instead of fiat.

As affirmed before, the technology will be provided by Socios.com, which runs its network on top of the Ethereum chain using Ethereum-compliant ERC20 tokens. However, each kind of token (one for each brand) will run on a separate sidechain in this ecosystem.

In order to be able to buy the tokens during the FTO, the fans of West Ham will need to buy $CHZ tokens first. $CHZ tokens are the ones created by Socios.com for their own platform, where the token sale will be held.

According to a piece of information presented by the press release, 46% of crypto investors are likely to buy tokens from high-profile clubs and West Ham can be considered one within the United Kingdom (despite not having the same reach like the ones like Chelsea, Manchester United or Liverpool internationally).

Teams like the French Paris Saint-German (PSG) and Italian club Juventus are already on the Socios platform right now. In related news, the Brazilian soccer club Atletico Mineiro also launched its own token last year, GaloCoin.