Chiliz: Bringing Blockchain and Crypto to Sports Fandom

6 min readOct 21, 2021

Chiliz is changing how people across the world interact with their favorite sports teams by providing each fan a voice and a vote.

Summary

Chiliz is a FinTech company founded in Malta that is changing the way sports fans interact with their favorite teams. The Socios platform, a blockchain-enabled sports entertainment platform, is Chiliz’s main offering. It gives fans a variety of options to directly vote on choices that affect their favorite teams.

The Chiliz platform’s extensive feature set allows clubs and sportsmen to engage with their fans and generate cash in novel ways.

Chiliz: From Passive Spectators to Active Influencers

Chiliz is a FinTech company based in Malta that is working on new methods for sports fans to interact with their favorite teams and athletes. Chiliz’s main product is Socios, a blockchain-enabled sports entertainment platform that allows fans to vote on decisions that directly affect their favorite teams in a number of ways. The platform’s extensive feature set, on the other hand, gives team owners and league operators new methods to communicate with their fans and generate cash. The Chiliz Token (CHZ), which serves as a pricing benchmark and medium of exchange within the Chiliz ecosystem, is the foundation of the Socios platform.

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Socios Fan Token: Fan-Driven Decision Making

Chiliz has partnered with some of the world’s most well-known athletic organizations, including Barcelona FC, Juventus, and Paris Saint-Germain in soccer, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in mixed martial arts, and a number of gaming companies.

Fans may get started by signing up for the Socios.com website and earning CHZ, which can then be used to buy Fan Tokens for a certain athletic organization.

Fan Tokens are issued by internationally recognized sports teams and organizations and are tokenized representations of voting rights for their respective issuers.

While CHZ tokens are the platform’s exclusive currency, Fan Tokens are issued by internationally recognized sports teams and organizations and are tokenized representations of voting rights for their respective issuers. Users who own Fan Tokens for a team, in other words, can vote on whatever decisions the team chooses to crowdsource to their followers on Socios.

The Socios voting process is powered by smart contracts that run automatically and transparently on the Chiliz blockchain, and the selections up for vote might range from new jersey design selection to team pairings for forthcoming exhibition games.

To ensure maximum consumer appeal, organizations that fully embrace this crowdsourced decision engine can even allow fans to help determine which players are drafted onto the squad or develop new item designs.

Fan Tokens are frequently referred to as ‘Vote Tokens’ as a result of this.

Every athletic organization that uses Chiliz technology has its own limited amount of Fan Tokens, and when a new organization joins Socios, they must determine the first sale price of their Fan Tokens, which is in CHZ. In a Fan Token Offering, these Fan Tokens will be made available for purchase on a first-come, first-served basis at the agreed-upon pricing point (FTO). Before starting an FTO, Socios will make key details about the token release public, including the FTO’s start and end dates, the Fan Token’s opening price, and completely diluted market cap, allowing consumers to make well-informed investment decisions.

Chiliz Creates New Ways to Engage

While Fan Tokens are primarily meant to provide sports fans a say in the decision-making process of their favorite sporting organization, there are other ways users can benefit from these digital assets. Users can swap Fan Tokens with other users on Chiliz Exchange, Socios’ peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplace, once they have publicly acquired one via an FTO.

Chiliz Exchange is a simple web interface or an iOS/Android mobile app that helps stimulate user involvement, especially as demand for specific teams’ Fan Tokens swings in response to breaking news or forthcoming events.

Additionally, at the discretion of the issuing organization, Fan Tokens can be traded for other items such as VIP experiences, complimentary tickets, and limited-edition souvenirs.

Chiliz’ principal offering is Socios, however the company is constantly expanding its applicability.

The Chiliz Blockchain Campus, a privately-owned crypto incubator focusing on boosting blockchain technology adoption across Asia and Europe, was founded as a result of this approach to blockchain deployment.

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How Does Chiliz Work?

Chiliz’s extensive adoption of its sports entertainment platform is due to the fact that users from all over the world can engage with only a basic grasp of the system’s underlying blockchain technology.

Chiliz’ use of blockchain technology, while understated, is critical in guaranteeing that the digital assets in its ecosystem — CHZ tokens and Fan Tokens — are easily traceable, verifiable, and unchangeable.

A fixed quantity of 8.8 billion CHZ tokens was created on the main Ethereum network in October 2018 and allocated to early donors, with no public sales outside of what was made available through chosen cryptocurrency exchanges.

CHZ began as an ERC-20 token, but due to Binance Launchpool’s active engagement in launching new Fan Tokens as part of a strategic alliance with Chiliz, the token was also built to be BEP-2 compatible.

Fan Tokens, on the other hand, are created via a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism on the Socios sidechain.

Instead of relying on network decentralization, PoA empowers a small group of pre-approved “authority” nodes to create and validate new blocks. Because these authority nodes are so important to the network’s security and success, the organizations or individuals who manage them are usually publicly identified in order to build trust in the system.

While the Chiliz team is now in charge of confirming the majority of the network’s transactions, Rakuten, a leading European retailer, recently announced that it will host an authority node on the Chiliz blockchain.

As Chiliz grows in popularity, the team intends to assemble a group of key partners willing to serve as network validators.

As a result, permissioned PoA networks like Chiliz are less decentralized than other blockchain networks that use standard protocols like Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).

PoA networks, on the other hand, are scalable, secure, and capable of processing a large number of transactions per second, making them a good fit for collaborative commercial initiatives like Socios.

Furthermore, rather than the main Ethereum network, all of Socios’ trade activity and vote results are securely and transparently recorded on this sidechain, allowing Chiliz to better regulate the network’s gas prices and assure speedy and cost-effective transactions.

The smart contracts that are used to automatically execute the judgments generated from Socios’ fan influence polls are likewise managed by the Chiliz PoA sidechain. The Socios platform acts as an oracle, connecting the project’s permissioned sidechain to the Ethereum mainnet, and is the only way for CHZ and Fan Tokens to be exchanged.

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Everyone’s a Winner With Chiliz and CHZ

It was practically impossible for the typical sports fan to directly participate in the decision-making process for their favorite sports teams and organizations until the arrival of blockchain technology.

Chiliz’ cutting-edge sports entertainment platform employs blockchain technology to turn inactive spectators into active influencers, giving sports and esports organizations new methods to monetize audience participation.

Chiliz’ growing list of strategic partners and enterprise users continues to increase, and platforms like Socios and NBA Top Shot are providing a whole new dimension to the fan experience by subtly incorporating blockchain technology into popular commercial interests.