By
Mayowa Adebajo
March 12th, 2024
The first professional fantasy football league wants to give its members the perfect impression of being a team owner. The aim is ambitious, so are the funding expectations: the project wants to raise nearly $100 million.
Football is back: the NFL regular season is to start in a few weeks. It is time to enjoy the first games of your favorite team, buy the new merch, reminisce about Eagles victory and develop your own special snacks for Sunday Night Football parties. And it is the right time to start checking the stats of the players and inventing creative punishments as fantasy football is about to take over the minds of millions of fans. But could the fantasy football experience be improved with the help of blockchain?
The Crown League, the first professional fantasy league owned by fans, knows the right answer. Even though fantasy football is one of the most popular pastimes in the U.S., there is a definitely a room for improvement. At the moment fantasy football is ‘incredibly fragmented’ as described by Dan Nissanoff, CEO of CrownThrown Inc – the company behind the blockchain-based league. Over 60 million fans spend the season trading players and choosing the starters – but they do not really create the united society. According to Nissanoff, “Nobody cares about other teams”.
The 19/20 season may become a turning point for the fantasy community as the Crown League will begin the first competition. 12 teams operated by professional managers will form the initial league. The structure of the Crown League will resemble the one of the real league: the general manager is backed by front office staff, the initial roaster will be formed during a live draft. The place of the team’s owner will be taken by token owners.
The Crown League offers the fantasy players the opportunity to maximize their football experience. The native token of the platform will be used to ‘own’ the teams. Fans all over the world will get an opportunity to influence the day-to-day decisions of the managing staff. What is more, it is the community of the token holders that determines the assignment of general manager.
The project of CrownThrown Inc is ambitious. The popularity of fantasy football combined with the well-thought blockchain-based architecture can create the project to win multimillion audiences. That explains the high bar the team has set for the fund-raising process: nearly $100 million. CrownThrown has chosen rather innovative approach to the token sale: the pre-sale will be followed by a series of 12 smaller ICOs. This concept has more to say than just balanced approach to raising a big sum of money: the number of ICOs echoes the number of teams in the future league. The public ICO is expected to be scheduled for the end of 2018 or the first quarter of 2019.
Fantasy football does not bring its fans multimillion contracts or Super Bowl rings. But the Crown League can upgrade the fans’ experience and make them feel like real team owners. This project is created to unite people fascinated with the spectacular sport which combines strength and intelligence – and it achieves it with the help of the top technologies. The Crown League is going to become Tom Brady of the fantasy community: it does not want one great season – it wants to make history.