Launching a Blockchain-Based Fan Platform with Borussia Dortmund
By: Thomas Euler
Tags: Token, Football, Borussia Dortmund, Blockchain, Sports Business

Launching a Blockchain-Based Fan Platform with Borussia Dortmund

Today, we are launching the BVB-FanToken App together with Bundesliga top club Borussia Dortmund. During the Early Access Phase that begins now, interested users can register and will be unlocked on a rolling basis.

Here’s an excerpt from our joint press release:

With the BVB-FanToken App, the club aims to establish a participatory digital ecosystem for its fans worldwide. It will be a platform that enables a new form of direct interactions between fans and the club, fueled by votings and crowd ideations. Carsten Cramer, BVB’s managing director, outlines the strategy behind the project: “The relationship to our fans worldwide means a great deal to us. When it comes to the digital-native generations, we observe that their behavior is changing. They have been brought up in an online world. They have different habits and expectations when it comes to community and participation. Liquiditeam’s innovative platform will allow us to empower our fans to become co-creators of their fan experience.”

The launch also marks the release of our LT Fan Platform, on which the BVB-FanToken App is built. LT Fan Platform allows every professional sports entity to launch its own tokenized fan ecosystem with ease. Leveraging the capabilities of blockchain and token economics, clubs and athletes can use our Fan Platform to develop a digital ecosystem for their fans.

Let me take you on a little tour through our thought process and goals going forward.

The world that young(-ish) people, Millennials and GenZs, grew up in is vastly different from the mass media age in which today’s sports business matured. Most people from those generations consume content, develop and maintain their relationships, and organize their work and lives in digital-first (and increasingly even mobile-only) ways. Of course, the same holds true for young sports fans. They have different ideas about content, community, and user experience. Thus, sports clubs and athletes will have to adapt their practices to those fans’ needs — and even start to develop business models that align with them — to stay relevant and compete in the digital attention economy.

In light of this, we are developing LT Fan Platform as a customizable digital infrastructure for professional sports organizations and athletes. It allows them to create innovative and rich experiences for their fans. On top of those, they can build a digital business with ease.

But most importantly, we are laser-focused on developing a service that fans love. Hence, they are the starting point and priority in all our product development decisions for our Fan Platform. Being passionate sports fans ourselves, we know that fandom is about proximity, participation, and community. Especially in Europe, sports even have their foundation in membership organizations. With LT Fan Platform, we enable clubs and athletes to create their own digital ecosystem that translates these values into the digital age.

Let’s zoom in a bit so we can take a look at what the different participants of the sports ecosystem want and need and how our Fan Platform addresses those needs.

Community, Content, Participation

Fans want to be as close as possible to their favorite clubs and athletes. Some crave community, direct interactions, and relationships; others are looking for exclusive and in-depth insights. And all of them want their voice to be heard. Whether their favorite team is in the process of making an important decision, or their superstar is planning a new project: fans love it when their opinion is valued and considered.

Especially digital-native fans are used to this, as it is common practice in today’s creator-centric media world where they have direct interactions with their favorite creators. Sports clubs and athletes will increasingly have to build similarly engaging digital experiences in order to connect with the younger generations successfully. Luckily, there’s a lot of potential in doing so.

A Huge Digital Opportunity

Over the last years, both digital goods and subscriptions have become popular and well-performing business models. They allow premium content and engaged communities to thrive, especially when created around high-interest niches and differentiated content. Sports is almost perfectly positioned to benefit from those trends. Fans are highly emotionally invested and have a big willingness to contribute to their favorite club’s or athlete’s success. The latter two, meanwhile, are in the rare position of actually being able to offer truly differentiated, even unique, content and experiences.

The Missing Link

The above seems obvious. And yet, we didn’t see a major move towards digital platforms, premium content, and community businesses in sports so far. While there are first movers, both on league and club levels, the industry is still largely focused on those parts of the business that made them successful in the mass media age: selling broadcasting rights and sponsorships (to this day a rather solid business, I should add). The digital fan relationship, meanwhile, is mostly reliant on the big social media platforms — who of course are the major beneficiaries of the fans’ accumulated attention.

Digital direct-to-consumer platforms and business models, in contrast, are still largely a novelty. The reasons for this are plentiful. One major factor certainly is: sports clubs and athletes aren’t tech companies. It’s hard enough to build a state-of-the-art digital platform. Developing it continuously, making sure the technology remains up to date, the user experience excellent, and the solution compliant is a dedicated business. That’s where LT Fan Platform comes in.

It consists of:

a fully customizable, feed-based application for your fans (desktop and mobile)

various digital fan participation modules like blockchain-based votings, crowd ideations, and more modules that we’ll roll out shortly

your own blockchain-based token, a digital item that your fans can use to interact with you and one another in the application

digital publishing tools for text, audio, video, and image content

a business engine that supports selling tokens as well as subscriptions or “digital memberships”

In short, it’s a state-of-the-art digital toolkit that can be used for various purposes, such as:

building a direct-to-consumer, premium content business

forming a digital membership-based organization that delegates real authority to fans

establishing a digital community where fans co-create their fan experience

and many more

And what about those tokens?

The platform’s main interaction model is built around tokens. While blockchain is the same technology that powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, these are only one of the various types of tokens that exist. On our Fan Platform, tokens have a completely different concept than currency tokens: they are a digital social item that fans can use inside their fan community to support ideas, content, and comments they enjoy. To this end, LT Fan Platform introduces a feature called “boost”. You can think of a boost as a “like with superpowers”, a truly valuable and impactful digital interaction.

Operators of a Fan Platform — we call them hosts internally — can decide how fans will gather tokens. Our Fan Platform supports various ways from purchasing to collecting tokens for contributions to the community or other activities. For instance, users can be rewarded if they write a comment that receives a lot of engagement or when they come up with an idea that the host implements.

In doing so, we want to incentivize constructive and collaborative user behavior. Our design goal is to create a space that feels markedly different from what people experience on social media nowadays, where trolling and harassment have sadly become commonplace.

The essence

To sum it up, LT Fan Platform is a new digital infrastructure for professional sports clubs and athletes. It uses blockchain-based tokens to fuel their individual digital fan communities. Our toolkit can power content businesses as well as digital membership organizations. It’s made for clubs and athletes who want to empower their fans and create digital proximity.

If you are interested to learn more, check out our website or schedule a demo. And visit the BVB-FanToken App to see the LT Fan Platform in action.