What is SANTOS?

TL;DR

SANTOS, the Santos football club’s official cryptocurrency, is part of a wave of fan tokens shooting sports organizations into Web3. With prospects of higher monetization and fan engagement for fans, sports teams, and the involved crypto projects alike, fan tokens have been taking the crypto world by storm. How did this come to be, and what does everyone get out of it? Well, let’s get into it with our first article on the subject, covering SANTOS.

What is SANTOS?

Rejoice, because the soccer team Santos FC (or football, depending on which side of the pond you’re on) now has a cryptocurrency for their team! The cryptocurrency SANTOS, the product of the partnership between of Santos FC and Binance, is aiming to up the fan experience by offering a new dimension to fandom.

Santos FC, or Santos Futebol Clube, is a Brazilian football club based in São Paulo. The historied and decorated club was founded in 1912, amassing fans all over Brazil and the world since then. With fans that are as dedicated as Santos’s, as is the case with many sports teams, comes an opportunity for fan token and fan experience projects to tap into their enthusiasm.

And for newcomers to the club, this token offers the opportunity to participate in the fan community while being able to interact with the team. While feeling like they have more of a stake in their favorite team, fans can also feel like they have more of a voice. How exactly does the token give them more of a voice? Well, with fan tokens, like governance tokens, token holders are able to vote on certain things. In the case of SANTOS, holders can do things such as choose new backgrounds for the team’s social media profile picture, or vote on their favorite player.

With more projects popping up that support fan experiences such as NBA Top Shot, there is forming a new Web3 ecosystem that is adding a new dimension to supporting your favorite team, player, or club.

Why was SANTOS created?

The SANTOS token was launched via the partnership between Santos FC and Binance, and comes at a time when many sports organizations are still reeling from the financial impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The forced stoppage of in-person events of this course of time may very well have led clubs like Santos FC to explore other monetization opportunities. Hence (possibly) $SANTOS.

To understand why this is likely to be a long-lasting figure in sports fandom, it is important to look at why crypto projects issue tokens themselves. Tokenization, or the act of representing an asset through a cryptocurrency, has proven itself a very effective vehicle for projects to raise money. And Santos FC is no different.

What can one do with the $SANTOS token?

So how does SANTOS benefit the fans? As mentioned before, holders can vote on things like social media profile pictures and other team-related events. Of course, this won’t be impactful like how voting with a governance token in a decentralized crypto project is. That is, fans won’t be dictating any player trades😉. Nevertheless, SANTOS upgrades the fan experience by giving holders perks like attending exclusive team events and early access to team-related NFT drops. In fact, earlier this year the club recently offered token holders the chance to win an expenses-paid trip to Portugal.

And like other tokens, SANTOS functions as a store of value as its price goes up so that fans can monetize their fandom. Furthermore, because of crypto’s universal nature and availability on global exchanges like Poloniex, the club may very well see an influx of new fans as the token gains in popularity.

How to acquire $SANTOS

SANTOS is available on multiple exchanges like Poloniex! You can acquire SANTOS through trading a USDT and USDD trading pair: SANTOS/USDT | SANTOS/USDD

Feeling ready to get started? Sign-up is easy! Just hop on over to https://poloniex.com/signup/ to start your crypto journey🚀

What is SANTOS? was originally published in The Poloniex blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.