28.03.2024

Sports Live-Streamer Will Reward Viewers With Its Own Crypto

SportsCastr says the tokens can be earned at the «thousands of sports bars» on FanWide’s U.S. network and will be redeemable for cash. A wallet for the tokens, called (surprise) FanWallet has also been set up by the firms.

Sports live-streaming provider SportsCastr is launching its own cryptocurrency to reward viewers and encourage interactions.

The company – which is backed by the NFL Players Association – announced Wednesday it has teamed with the FanWide platform for the effort. The new FanChain (FANZ) token will be made available on FanWide, which helps people locate local game watch parties, and given out to people checking in to listed events.

“FanWide has promoted over 1.5 million watch parties and is the official fan club network of teams in the NFL, LaLiga, Ruby League and others”, said SportsCastr CEO Kevin April. “This rollout represents one of the largest real-world deployments of blockchain in fandom, and we’re just getting started.”

The firms hope in future to grow the usage of FANZ to local bars and venues, where they would accept the tokens in exchange for discounts, drinks or «other rewards.»

The FanChain website says FANZ can also be sent from any ethereum wallet and that the token is ERC-20 standard «compliant.» The supply has been capped at 600 million tokens, the site adds.

Speculation Undermines Crypto Prices and Utility, Says Bank of England Senior Economist

Speculation creates congestion on the blockchain that harms a cryptocurrency’s utility and overall value, a senior economist at the Bank of England (BoE) has said.Peter Zimmerman, who has been a senior economist at the U.K. central bank since 2007, argued in a working paper published Friday that speculation undermines the effectiveness of cryptocurrencies to function as a means of payment.

Because blockchains have a limited processing capacity, periods of high usage make transactions slower and more expensive, the paper observes. Assuming a cryptocurrency’s value derives from its utility as a payment tool, on-chain congestion makes transactions slower and more expensive, making it less useful and therefore less valuable to holders.

«Limited settlement space creates competition between users of the currency, so speculative activity can crowd out monetary usage,» reads the working paper. «Speculation congests the blockchain, reducing the moneyness of cryptocurrency, and impacting its price.»

Rampant speculation might have actually impeded mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies, Zimmerman’s working paper suggests. There is also the secondary «digital gold» effect that as the price rises, some users who would otherwise have used cryptocurrencies as a means of payment decide to hoard it instead, anticipating a further rise in the price.

If speculative activity could be moved off distributed ledgers, using cash-settled derivatives or layer-2 scaling protocols like the lightning network, this could have «profound consequences» for the nature of cryptocurrencies that could make it behave more similarly to other asset-classes, the paper suggests.

Zimmerman assumes that the main value driver of cryptocurrencies is their utility as a means of payment, although he does suggest that the model may not apply in the same degree to initial coin offering (ICO) tokens, where multiple versions work on the same blockchain at the same time.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Zimmerman said that the model applies to any circumstance where speculative activity «makes it harder to use the token for its intended purpose.» That can include peer-to-peer trading for security tokens as well as platform tokens, like ether, where «conflict between demand for blockchain space from dapps, and demand for blockchain space from speculation» can impede utility.

The sudden surge in popularity for the ethereum trading game CryptoKitties «filled up the blockchain and made it harder for people to use dapps and exercise smart contracts,» he added as an example.

The BoE allows staff to articulate their own views and findings through working papers. These however do not represent the views of the bank itself. The BoE formed a working group in January with five other central banks to share research and ideas surrounding central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).

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