SportFi has spent most of its life in a familiar lane: tokens that reward fandom with voting rights, perks and a thin layer of speculative trading. The next version, mapped out by some of the sector’s biggest builders, proposes a more ambitious destination — one where sports become a live data feed for smart contracts and tokens behave less like collectibles and more like programmable markets.
The logic is simple: sports already produce consistent, globally understood results. Win, lose, qualify, get relegated – the “score” is the scoreboard. If token supply and incentives can be tied to these outcomes, SportFi starts to look like a gamified asset class rather than a bolt-on engagement product.
A roadmap outlined by sports-focused blockchain company Chiliz refers to this shift as “gamified tokenomics”: matchday results would trigger mint-and-burn mechanics, for example burning supply on wins or expanding it on losses, executed transparently through smart contracts.
“Our journey is about trying to become like an emotion marketplace over these tokens and make them available everywhere so that developers can create tools where we can actually play with these tokens as an emotion game,” Chiliz CEO Alexandre Dreyfus told CoinDesk in an interview.
Dreyfus cited it less as gambling and more as an emotional marketplace that reflects the sport’s competitive rhythm: seasonal, event-driven and reactive to the real world.
This is important because it changes who the product is for. Fan tokens have typically relied on a sense of “ownership” of a team, such as voting on the color of the club’s warm-up kit and what song plays in the stadium when the players walk out. However, trade activity has often been driven by headline moments – signings, management changes, tournaments.
A rules-based, outcome-dependent supply model is designed to formalize this behavior into the token itself, making pricing and scarcity part of the matchday experience rather than an unintended byproduct.
Crossing with prediction markets
If that layer works, it opens the door to the next: DeFi around sports-native assets. In practice, this means building plumbing for tokens to be used as collateral, traded in deeper liquidity pools, or packaged into structured products, a step towards sports assets behaving like other crypto primitives.
This is also where SportFi starts to cross the prediction markets without trying to be. “We’re investing in making our fan tokens more gamified. So maybe I’ll bet on Polymarket that Barcelona will beat Paris Saint-Germain, but then maybe I’ll hedge that by buying the fan token from Barca,” Dreyfus said.
The idea is that fan tokens can become another instrument of match results: a liquid, tradable expression of sentiment that can sit alongside event contracts rather than replace them.
The longer arc is even more conventional and potentially more transformative. Sports organizations are famously asset-rich and cash-poor, sitting on valuable media rights, brand IP and stadium finances while dealing with volatile costs. Tokenization can turn these future cash flows into on-chain instruments, giving clubs alternative liquidity routes beyond banks and specialist funds. Decentral, a Chilliz-based protocol, tokenizes future receivables such as broadcasting rights, allowing teams to receive stablecoin liquidity.
None of this is guaranteed. Regulation will define how far SportFi can go, especially when tokens resemble gambling, as the prediction markets have found.
Nevertheless, SportFi’s journey shows signs of evolving from simply putting a badge on a blockchain to using smart contracts to translate sports’ real-world results and ultimately their real-world cash flows into programmable financial markets.
