Crypto.com Naming Agreement ‘Paid for Itself’ After Coin Surges
Crypto.com Naming Agreement ‘Paid for Itself’ After Coin Surges
(Bloomberg) -- Crypto.com’s deal last week to replace Staples as the title sponsor of an iconic downtown Los Angeles sports center appears to have already paid for itself.
The CRO token has surged more than 55% in the past seven days as of Monday and reached a record on Sunday, according to pricing from CoinGecko, and is now the 13th-biggest by market capitalization at about $18 billion. Its gains come as many other top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether and Binance Coin, fall back.
Two people familiar with the naming agreement said last week that it was worth $700 million over 20 years. The deal is a continuation of a trend by Crypto.com and others to gain name recognition and customers through pacts in sports, music and more.
“The resulting PR doubled its token price and led to a $9 billion run-up in market cap,” Meltem Demirors, chief strategy officer at CoinShares International Ltd., said on Twitter. “The deal paid for itself ~13x over, difficult to untangle token distribution and who benefited, but smart token marketing strategy!”
In a subsequent post, Demirors said she doesn’t own any CRO tokens nor does she have any financial interest in the deal.
While Crypto.com’s token has surged in recent days, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will stay in the upper echelons of the digital-token world; many coins have vaulted higher for one reason or another, only to fall back in the famously volatile space. And the deal brought up numerous citations of the same phenomenon with dot-com companies that made such pacts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, not all of which ended well for the named sponsor.
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