SportFi has spent most of its life on a familiar path: tokens that reward fandom with voting rights, perks, and a thin layer of speculative trading. The next version, developed by some of the biggest manufacturers in the sector, suggests a more ambitious destination: one where sports becomes a live data feed for smart contracts and where tokens behave less like collectibles and more like programmable markets.
The logic is simple: sport already produces consistent and globally understood results. Win, lose, qualify, get relegated – the “regulatory layer” is the scoreboard. If token offering and incentives can be tied to these outcomes, SportFi begins to resemble a gamified asset class rather than a complementary engagement product.
A roadmap outlined by sports-focused blockchain firm Chiliz describes this change as “gamified tokenomics”: matchday results would trigger mint-and-burn mechanisms, for example, burning the supply in case of wins or extending it in case of losses, executed transparently via smart contracts.
“Our journey is trying to become like a sentiment marketplace on top of these tokens and make them available everywhere so that developers can build tools where we can actually play with these tokens like a sentiment game,” Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO of Chiliz, told CoinDesk in an interview.
Dreyfus presented it less as a game of chance and more as a marketplace of feelings that reflects the sport’s competitive rhythm: seasonal, event-driven, and responsive to real-world performance.
This is important because it changes who the product is intended for. Fan Tokens typically rely on a sense of “ownership” within a team, such as voting on the color of the club’s warm-up kit and the song played in the stadium when players come out. Commercial activity, however, has often been boosted by big moments: signings, management changes, the running of tournaments.
A rules-based, results-linked supply model is designed to formalize this behavior in the token itself, making price formation and scarcity part of the match day experience rather than an accidental byproduct.
Intersection with prediction markets
If this layer works, it opens the door to the next one: DeFi around sports-native assets. In practice, this means building the plumbing for tokens to be used as collateral, traded in deeper liquidity pools, or bundled into structured products, a step toward sporting assets behaving like other cryptographic primitives.
This is also where SportFi begins to cross over into prediction markets, without trying to become one. “We are investing in making our fan tokens more gamified. So maybe I bet on Polymarket that Barcelona will beat Paris Saint-Germain, but maybe I will then hedge that by buying the Barça fan token,” Dreyfus said.
The idea is that fan tokens could become another instrument for matching outcomes: a liquid, tradable expression of sentiment that can accompany event contracts rather than replacing them.
The long-term arc is even more conventional and potentially more transformative. Sports organizations are known for being asset-rich and cash-poor because they have valuable media rights, brand intellectual property and stadium economics, all while managing volatile costs. Tokenization could transform these future cash flows into on-chain instruments, providing clubs with alternative liquidity routes beyond banks and specialist funds. Decentral, a Chilliz-based protocol, tokenizes future receivables such as broadcast rights, allowing teams to receive stable liquidity.
None of this is guaranteed. Regulation will define how far SportFi can go, especially when tokens resemble gambling, as prediction markets have discovered.
Nonetheless, SportFi’s journey shows signs of evolving from simply putting a badge on a blockchain to using smart contracts to translate real sports results and, ultimately, their real cash flows into programmable financial markets.