The objective of the boss of Socios? To knock crypto out of the park

What's a sports fan's dream come true? Being the announcer at an AC Milan home game, in front of 75,000 roaring Rossoneri fans?

To play a football match on the hallowed turf of your beloved FC Barcelona?

To visit an F1 team's garage before the race and then watch the Monza Grand Prix from a VIP box?

These are some of the biggest rewards given out as incentives to join Chiliz, or CHZ-based fan token programs on Socios.com. There are also smaller, but still desirable prizes, like meeting your sports idols, choosing the music to play when your team scores a goal, or voting on next year's team jersey design.

Socios.com now partners with more than 170 sports clubs in 25 countries and 10 sports, including football, soccer, basketball, cricket, esports, ice hockey, martial arts mixed, motor sports, tennis and rugby. Eighty of these organizations have already launched their official fan tokens on the Socios.com app, and it has big deals with giants, such as Manchester City, Barcelona and the Aston Martin F1 team.

Alex Dreyfus chats with Magazine from his office. Source: Julian Jackson

The team captain behind it all is Socios CEO Alex Dreyfus. “I am French, I am 45 at the moment. And I've been an internet entrepreneur for 25 years. I left school before [I was] 18. I created my first company in 1995 at the beginning of the internet. I am the Web 1.0 generation. So over the past 25 years, my journey has always been to try to use technology to create something that doesn't exist and try to embrace it before others. »

He started by developing a French city guide that first covered Paris, then 36 other French cities. A serial entrepreneur, he embarked on an online gambling project, with sports betting and online poker. While there are fewer regulations in France, unlike the UK, there are no betting shops everywhere. He moved to Malta 17 years ago and 10 years ago cashed in his bets to raise capital for his next project.

Amusingly, he started out as a Bitcoin skeptic. Coming from the highly regulated world of online gambling, he struggled to imagine a decentralized system without an oversight body.

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Skeptical bitcoin… at first

In Iceland on his honeymoon, Dreyfus came across a shop that took Bitcoin, which triggered something in the back of his head. When he returned home, he discovered that the gaming space was full of crypto enthusiasts making money. "I saw my Twitter feeds - all my friends trading crypto, talking about it."

"And so, in 2017, I spent a lot of time educating myself." He followed Andreas Antonopoulos and a few other crypto influencers.

"As an entrepreneur, I always try to find new opportunities, not as an investment but to grow. At the end of 2017, I started looking at crypto from a sporting angle."

An idea was germinating in his mind. Sport is global - an international language. This means that many, if not most, supporters do not live in the country of origin. According to one, there are 253 million Manchester United football fans in China, almost four times the total population of the UK!