Socios boss’ goal? To knock crypto out of the park – Cointelegraph Magazine

What is a sports fan’s dream come true? To be the announcer at an AC Milan home game, in front of 75,000 roaring Rossoneri fans?

To play a football match on the hallowed turf of your beloved FC Barcelona?

To tour the garage of an F1 team pre-race, then watch the Monza Grand Prix from a VIP box?

These are some of the biggest rewards handed out as incentives to join Chiliz, or CHZ-based, fan token schemes on Socios.com. There are also lesser, but still desirable prizes, like meeting your sports idols, choosing the music to be played when your team scores a goal, or voting on the design of next year’s team strip.

Socios.com has now partnered with over 170 sporting clubs across 25 countries and 10 sports, including American football, soccer, basketball, cricket, esports, ice hockey, mixed martial arts, motorsports, tennis and rugby. Eighty of these organizations have already launched their official fan tokens on the Socios.com app, and it has high-profile deals with giants, such as Manchester City, Barcelona and the Aston Martin F1 Team. 

The team captain behind this is Socios CEO Alex Dreyfus. “I’m French, 45 years old right now. And I’ve been an internet entrepreneur for the last 25 years. I left school before [I was] 18 years old. I created my first company in 1995 at the beginning of the internet. I’m the generation of the Web 1.0. So, for the last 25 years, my journey always has been to try to use the technology to create something that does not exist and try to embrace it before the others.”

He started by developing a French city guide that first covered Paris, then 36 other French cities. A serial entrepreneur, he moved on to an online gaming project, with sports betting and online poker. While there are fewer regulations in France, unlike in the United Kingdom, there aren’t betting shops everywhere. He moved to Malta 17 years ago and, 10 years ago, cashed out his betting ventures to raise capital for his next project.

Amusingly, he started out as a Bitcoin skeptic. Coming from the highly regulated world of online gambling, he had difficulty wrapping his thoughts around a decentralized system with no supervisory body.