Chiliz, a popular sports-focused blockchain platform, recently celebrated cracking the $1 billion market cap milestone. It has continued to climb and reached was able to break $1.3 billion earlier today.
The native token of the Chiliz platform (CHZ) has seen skyrocketing demand since the beginning of the month.
On March 1, the token was trading around $0.05. By March 4 the price had tripled to around $0.15 before retracing back o around $0.10 by March 6. However, by March 8 the price had risen back to the previous high. It then doubled once again to almost $0.31 the following day and is currently trading around $0.25
Chiliz Boosted on NFT Mania
The recent spike in the token’s price may be due to a few factors. One could be a corollary effect of the recent non-fungible token (NFT) craze. NFTs have seen an insane amount of interest in the past few weeks. In February alone, NFT sales surpassed $342 million. This is more than the entirety of NFTs sold in 2020.
Chiliz has successfully sealed several partnerships with top European football teams. It’s renowned for enabling fan engagement through the use of branded NFT fan tokens which it sells on Socios.com.
Most NFTs are created and traded on Ethereum, which has naturally seen an increase in usage recently. The CHZ token is also based on Ethereum, which has perhaps contributed to its current price action.
New Market Opportunities
On March 2, Chiliz CEO Alexandre Dreyfus announced that his company would be expanding into the US market. This could be another contributing factor to CHZ’s sixfold increase in price. Dreyfus said it would be opening an office in New York City, with an initial investment of $50 million.
The Malta-based company enables sports teams to offer cryptocurrency tokens to their fans. These tokens allow fans to vote in polls concerning their teams as well as receive special promotions and rewards.
“We head to the U.S. with a proven track record in generating millions of dollars of revenue for some of Europe’s biggest sporting organizations,” Dreyfus said.
Juventus was the first major football club to collaborate with Chiliz in 2019. Since then, clubs such as Barcelona, Paris St. Germain, and most recently AC Milan, have followed suit. AC Milan generated $6 million on the day that its tokens launched.
