Gibraltar has made the crypto world sit up and take notice yet again this week, this time with the news that Gibraltar United, a Gibraltar Premier League football team, will be providing its players with the option of being paid through cryptocurrency.
While not entirely unknown in sports, payment of players through cryptocurrencies is still very new and usually focused on gaming, betting and promotions. In January, Arsenal became the first major football club in UK to sign a sponsorship deal with cryptocurrency, CashBet. Later in the year, Michael Owen, Liverpool and Real Madrid star, announced that he intends to launch his own cryptocurrency, OWN, to allow investors to buy merchandise and donate to charity. In late May 2018, Wesley Sneijder, former FIFA World Cup player and vSport Director, launched an ecosystem powered by blockchain and dedicated to the sport industry in partnership with TRON. Of note, is the fact that it appears to be the smaller clubs leading the way; it was Turkish amateur side, Harunustapor, that became the first club to sign a player using cryptocurrency to pay the fee.
Gibraltar United owner, Pablo Dana, an investor in the Quantocoin ICO, co-founder and CEO of Quantocoin and through whom the club started a sponsorship agreement last year, spoke to The Guardian, explaining that all player contracts will be amended by next season to include agreements to pay in cryptocurrency. The move, he claims, is facilitated by Gibraltar’s regulatory framework that is creating a platform based on transparency and compliance, and driven by the club’s preoccupation with transparency.
Dana predicts that this is just the start of revolutionising the issue of transparency in finance in the world of football and has stated his belief that the nature of the technology is such that it could work to curtail the corruption scandals that have plagued the sport for years. He is also committed to the principles of decentralisation and democratisation that he feels is a key element of the changes being wrought in the world of finance by the blockchain and crypto, making it easier to pay foreign players who may have difficulty setting up bank accounts in the country where their employing clubs are based. This latter point is especially useful to support the development both of smaller clubs and of talented players who need global mobility to grow their careers.
Quantocoin is a decentralised payment platform built on the Waves blockchain aiming to integrate the QTC crytpocurrecy into everyday financial services through widescale public adoption. “It’s primary goal is to integrate and connect QTC into the traditional financial world and to create a single gateway through QTC platform for users, traders, investors and financial institutions with a whole range of add-on services.” (https://quantocoin.io)
