The Spanish soccer team FC Barcelona will create its own cryptocurrency to help keep it funded.
The soccer organization has denied several deals from other cryptocurrency companies due to its interest in making its own. The team will introduce several nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, as well as its own cryptocoin.
“We’re developing our own metaverse, [which is why] we rejected the chance to be associated with any cryptocurrency enterprises,” Barcelona President Joan Laporta said at a Monday presentation at the Mobile World Congress trade show.
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“We want to create our own cryptocurrency, and we have to do that ourselves. We are different because we survive financially from what we can generate through the industry of sport,” Laporta explained to the audience. “We do not have big corporations or shareholders behind us. That forces us to be imaginative, innovative, brave, and be a step ahead in many areas that surround the sports industry.”
Barcelona had started a marketing partnership with the NFT marketplace Ownix. Barcelona canceled the contract in November of last year after Ownix adviser Moshe Hogeg was arrested on charges of cryptocurrency-based fraud that month.
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Laporta said that he hopes to present the team’s first set of NFTs as part of a project that will help the team with its finances. FC Barcelona has a massive debt totaling 1.35 billion, according to financial plans approved in December 2021. The organization took the debts on in an effort to improve the team’s stadium, Camp Nou, the capacity of which executives hope could expand to 105,000. The expansion, which will be finished by 2025, would be the largest stadium in Europe.
Several cryptoexchanges declined to ban Russian accounts from access to their accounts on Monday after a Ukrainian official requested a total ban of Russian access to cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.
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