More and more often, we hear about blockchain, and almost always associate this term with new finance, opportunities for managing contracts, business agreements, and little else. Did you know that many other things can be done with it, some of which could impact the world of sports as well?

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a new and controversial paradigm that could completely redefine the internet starting with four basic pillars: decentralization, transparency, security, and immutability. The first few decades of the internet have indeed shown its many opportunities, but they have also highlighted risks, critical issues, and limitations that need to be solved and overcome.

In a nutshell, blockchain can be defined as a process in which multiple parties share computing resources (memory, CPU, bandwidth) to make a virtual, usually public, database available to users. It is a large distributed database that enables transactions that can be shared among multiple nodes in a network, and a series of blocks that store validated transactions and are related to each other by a Time Marker.

The blocks are linked together so that every transaction that is initiated on the network is validated by the network itself through the analysis of each individual block.

Ensuring transactions and decentralization is done by the central components of the blockchain, which checks and approves all transactions, giving rise to a network that shares the entire blockchain repository (with all blocks and all transactions).

The scene blockchain is breaking into

While it is not easy to anticipate just how much the blockchain might change the internet and our lives, the news today tells us that the younger generations are moving rapidly toward new avenues and experiences, increasingly based online, and are constantly looking for the ability to buy or enjoy online what they are interested in. So how is that affecting the world of sports and how people interact with sports content?

Long gone are the days when Jane Fonda’s videotapes first revolutionized the world of fitness: between 1982 and 1985 – it seems like a century ago, well before the expansion of the internet and social media, at a time still dominated by TV – more than 17 million copies of her aerobics classes were sold worldwide.

Not only that, but the era of the monthly subscription gym, with mandatory shift use (e.g., 7 to 8 p.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays), seems to be waning for many. People now want ways that they can keep fit at home, preferring to avoid downtime and travel.

But what will change between the opportunity to sell one’s services online, as is already happening, and doing so instead through blockchain-based platforms?

Get in shape with blockchain

Blockchain and sports already have a pretty close relationship in some surprising ways! As we have seen, sports blockchain represents a real paradigm shift. It affects many aspects of the relationship between those who sell something online and the platform that enables them to do so. The same happens for those who buy!

Above all, it will leave in the hands of those delivering courses or services the ownership of what they offer and the ability to manage their fees without intermediaries and without strings attached.

In simpler terms, if coaches today are tied to a physical gym or virtual space (the platform where they also sell their online services) to which they pay a fee or retrocede a portion of their income, the public blockchain could offer each of them a virtually free space (so they would not have to pay the fees anymore) that they can manage themselves.

But there is more. The new era we are entering will also be based on cryptocurrencies and tokens created specifically to be exchanged within a given sector (such as sports).

A cryptocurrency linked to, say, fitness, could be a valuable incentive for wellness and fitness, for two different reasons. First, it would motivate the viral purchase of the services provided, and second, it would give more social validity to the cryptocurrencies themselves.

This will be possible precisely by virtue of the characteristics of the blockchain, which is based on sharing, collaboration, and trust, rather than just the volume of business generated.

Blockchain applied to sports, here’s what will change

Like many dynamics triggered by the internet and refined over time through new technologie, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and tokens may soon represent win-win contexts in which everything can really change for the better for everyone.

These processes, also favored by the growing trend toward decentralization and the ever-growing impact of the sharing economy, will give sports new opportunities and also make this “sector” a model capable of sustaining itself on many more pillars than the economic one.

The great force of competition, which fuels sport and keeps it alive, will find a new and powerful boost in the paradigm of coopetition, sharing, and trust, an increasingly valued currency of exchange.