SportFi has spent most of its life in a familiar lane: tokens that reward fandom with voting rights, profits, and a thin veneer of speculative trading. The next version being mapped by some of the sector’s biggest builders suggests a more ambitious destiny: one in which sports become a source of live data for smart contracts and tokens behave less like collectibles and more like programmable markets.
The logic is simple: sports already produce consistent and globally understood results. Win, lose, qualify, relegation: the “settlement layer” is the scoreboard. If token supply and incentives can be tied to those outcomes, SportFi starts to look like a gamified asset class rather than a comprehensive engagement product.
One Roadmap outlined by sports-focused blockchain company Chiliz He frames this change as a “gamified tokenomics”: match-day results would trigger mint-and-burn mechanics, for example burning the supply in case of wins or expanding it in case of losses, executed transparently through smart contracts.
“Our journey is to try to become a sentiment marketplace on top of these tokens and make them available everywhere so that developers can create tools where we can play with these tokens as a sentiment game,” Chiliz CEO Alexandre Dreyfus told CoinDesk in an interview.
Dreyfus presented it less as a game of chance and more as a sentiment market that reflects the competitive pace of sport: seasonal, event-driven, and reactive to real-world performance.
That matters 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 players come out. However, commercial activity has often been driven by headline moments: signings, managerial changes, tournaments.
A rules-based, outcome-linked supply model is designed to formalize that behavior into the token itself, making price formation and scarcity part of the match-day experience rather than an accidental byproduct.
Intersection with prediction markets
If that layer works, it opens the door to the next one: DeFi around sports-native assets. In practice, that means building the pipelines for tokens to be used as collateral, traded in deeper liquidity pools, or packaged into structured products, a step toward sporting assets behaving like other primitive cryptocurrencies.
It’s also where SportFi starts to intersect with prediction markets, without trying to become one. “We’re investing in making our fan tokens more gamified. So maybe I’m betting on Polymarket that Barcelona is going to beat Paris Saint-Germain, but then maybe I’m going to hedge that by buying the Barça fan token,” Dreyfus said.
The idea is that fan tokens could become another instrument for match outcomes: a liquid, tradable expression of sentiment that can accompany event contracts rather than replace them.
The longer-term arc is even more conventional and potentially more transformative. Sports organizations are known to be asset-rich and cash-poor, boasting valuable media rights, brand intellectual property and stadium economics while managing volatile costs. Tokenization could convert those future cash flows into on-chain instruments, providing clubs with alternative liquidity routes beyond banks and specialized funds. Decentral, a Chilliz-based protocol, is tokenizing future receivables such as streaming rights, allowing teams to receive stablecoin liquidity.
None of this is guaranteed. Regulation will define how far SportFi can go, especially when the tokens resemble gambling, as prediction markets have discovered.
However, SportFi’s journey shows signs of evolution from simply putting a badge on a blockchain to using smart contracts to translate real-world sports results and, eventually, its real-world cash flows into programmable financial markets.
