In October, Coinbase announced sponsorships with the Canadian Football League, NBA’s Golden State Warriors, and the Nike Melbourne Marathon Festival.
Following FTX’s demise, Coinbase emerged as one of the first US-based cryptocurrency exchanges to venture back into the realm of sports sponsorships. In separate notices published in October, Coinbase announced its cooperation with the Canadian Football League, the Golden State Warriors of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the Nike Melbourne Marathon Festival.
Before it went bankrupt in November 2022, FTX entered into a partnership with the Warriors that resulted in the gathering of non-fungible tokens (NFT) and the distribution of Bitcoin to local nonprofit groups.
The chief commercial officer of the Warriors, Mike Kitts, stated that the goal of the partnership with Coinbase was to “build fandom using blockchain technology“. The Women’s National Basketball Association, the National Basketball Association, the NBA G League, and the NBA 2K League are all existing partnerships with the cryptocurrency exchange.
Coinbase appears to be filling the hole left by the collapse of FTX in 2022 from the perspective of a cryptocurrency corporation supporting the Warriors. The arrangement is now in progress.
The negative media attention that ensued from the decline of the cryptocurrency market in 2022 and the failure of FTX led to the cancellation of a significant number of sponsorship commitments.
In addition, Crypto.com has stepped up to fill in some of the gaps in the sector by forming a partnership with the UEFA Champions League in the month of August. Borussia Dortmund, a German football team, has entered into agreements with Coinbase and BlockDAG, a blockchain company.
During the height of its success, FTX established partnerships with prominent athletes such as Shaquille O’Neal, Naomi Osaka, and Tom Brady, who is considered a legend in the United States.
The deals included the rights to rename the Home Arena of the National Basketball Association’s Miami Heat to the FTX Arena until the year 2040. FTX debtors moved to rescind some of the payments that the exchange had made for sponsorships when the exchange went bankrupt in 2022.
A detail that was brought up during the criminal prosecution of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was that the money that was used for the agreements was allegedly implicated in misappropriating cash from the exchange’s sister firm, Alameda Research.
