IN THIS EPISODE A Borderless, Frictionless Currency

“In 2018, most of the top professional sports leagues in North America and Europe will share an important trait: They will be more international in composition than ever before.” –The New York Times[1]

There are 108 international players in the NBA, representing 42 countries and speaking 32 languages.[2] “Tencent attracted 190.9 million total views and averaged 12.2 million unique viewers per game, up 30 percent from 2016,”[3] for the 2017 NBA Finals. Keep all of those numbers in mind while you imagine a platform where users are sending each other digital gifts, and each of those microtransactions needs to be converted from one fiat currency into another before being processed by a bank or credit card processor, assuming of course, that at least one of the two currencies in the exchange are convertible at all; and with each conversion comes a corresponding fee and some duration of time between a few minutes, a few hours or a few days. With a decentralized currency, the process — and the sentence describing it — becomes simplified. User A tips User B with FanChain tokens and user B uses them to buy a ticket to a game.

FanChain removes the political, economic boundaries that prevent us from being one global community of sports fans. A critical question in the crypto universe is Why crypto? Whereas a number of projects have been developed that have difficulty confidently answering that question, the world of sports cannot be truly global so long as the reward systems that sustain the relationship between teams and fans, and fans and one another, is disparate and partitioned.