Fanzee said today it has closed on a $2 million round of funding to bring its idea of a Ton blockchain-based sports fan engagement platform.
The startup has built a fan engagement platform aimed at sports clubs that want to increase their level of interaction with their fans, enabling them to foster a greater sense of community and reward their most loyal supporters.
It’s an idea that has won considerable backing from investors such as TONcoin.fund, MEXC Pioneer, KuCoin Ventures, Huobi Incubator, vlg.digital, 3Commas, Orbs.com, and Hexit.capital, a part of Swiss based Hemma Group, to name just a few.
Fanzee CEO Ajay Jojo said he is honored to have received the backing of some of the greatest minds in the Web3 movement and promised to deliver “immense value” to millions of sports fans by leveraging digital assets such as NFTs.
Fanzee’s platform makes use of blockchain innovations such as tokenization to help sports clubs create interactive challenges such as quizzes. With it, they can effectively gamify fan loyalty programs and unlock new revenue streams, Fanzee said, while rewarding those fans for their participation.
For instance, Fanzee can help soccer teams to create matchday challenges such as a morning quiz that’s based on the events from the previous match, and player-vs-player challenges where fans can bet on important match events with their friends. Other ideas include an end of match quiz designed to test fans on how closely they followed the game, and an end of match challenge that involves collecting three video moments from the game.
By participating in these challenges, fans will be able to earn prizes such as experience points, NFT tokens and cryptocurrency (such as a club’s specific coin). Each fan who participates will be able to sign up and earn points towards their “fan level”. In that way, clubs could create their own fan leaderboards that rank all of their fans. This will inspire fans to step up their interaction in order to move on up the leaderboard to win even more valuable prizes. For example, a club could offer NFTs to its highest ranked fans that function as a match day ticket for the next home game.
Fanzee will also operate a third-party marketplace where fans can come together to buy and sell digital assets relating to their clubs. So if someone wins an NFT providing a free ticket to the next game, but they’re unable to be there, they can sell that NFT to someone else who is able to take advantage of it. What’s more, Fanzee abstracts away the complexity of using crypto wallets by automating these processes for fans that like to keep things simple.
Mark Chadwick, Head of Diligence at TONcoin.fund, a $250 million growth fund for projects building on the TON blockchain, said Fanzee’s focus is on bringing sport fans to the forefront by engaging with them in ways that were never possible before.
“Fanzee’s platform, with its gamification mechanics, will generate true value for sports organizations and their fans,” Chadwick insisted.
