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Advances in Blockchain & Branding In 2023

By Manoj Dharra

In the corporate world, the top priority is given to brand-building activity, no matter whether the company represents a service sector, a manufacturing entity, or a consumer-focused company. It helps differentiate between the winners and losers.

In recent times, blockchain has played a crucial role in helping the company develop a product taking into consideration consumer tastes and preferences.

Not all succeeded in achieving the set objective. In this section, we look at some of the big brands that have entered, exited, and doubled down on their use of blockchain technology through 2023.

One of the important events that has captured the imagination of the corporate world is sports, and within sports, it is football that has seen major iterations of opportunity for brand-building activities. It makes sense why corporations have tapped into many leagues. The success spread like wildfire, and hence, many leagues rushed to seize the opportunity.

The Premier League has followed the lead of La Liga and the Bundesliga by partnering with Sorare in January 2023 to offer NFT digital cards of footballers for use within its fantasy football games, offering new and novel ways to engage with their fans.

Sorare uses the Ethereum blockchain, a fantasy sports gaming platform built on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to register unique trading cards that depict football players.

This builds on the many deals struck between Premier League clubs and Web 3.0 giant Socios, offering Fan Tokens that bring utility in various ways.

If league owners experienced an adrenaline rush, the financing industry hardly remained unaware of the brewing success story that blockchain technology presented.

Citi, one of the world’s largest and best-known banks, announced in September 2023 that it is leveraging blockchain technology to power programmable finance solutions, including self-executing transactions.

Citi expects to improve its turnaround times and therefore its customers’ experience by offering 24/7 automated workflows, provided pre-set criteria are met.

The “future of money” that the blockchain industry has long predicted is becoming closer and closer with this programmable finance, and it’s fascinating to see how an established incumbent is driving it. As mentioned earlier, sports activity was the best suited to cash in on the growing adoption of web3 space.

In July 2023, Veloce, the world’s largest motorsports and media company, said it was developing its entire business to Web 3.0, handing over voting rights in respect of increasingly important decisions in the management of its business to its fans, and integrating their native cryptoasset within a range of games and applications.

Across many of the UK’s most cutting-edge, rapidly expanding, and future-oriented industries, Veloce’s multi-pillared gaming and sports media divisions operate since the company’s 2018 founding.

Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Veloce, Svendsen-Cook, discusses the development with Forbes, saying, “Blockchain technology is the most logical evolution for the business. We want to use the best technology to integrate all our fans. Blockchain gives us more transactional utility and integration into what we do. We want token holders to benefit from our success.

“Owning a slice of the blockchain via the token is the future of fan integration and the ownership structure of sports teams. The ambition here is to be a decentralised global sporting group.” he added.

Who’s Doubling down?

Reddit released the third and fourth generations of its collection of ‘avatars’, whilst Nike has partnered with EA Sports to “build new immersive experiences and unlock brand new levels of customisation in the gaming company’s ecosystem”.

Mastercard expanded on its earlier Web 3.0 interest—it has a crypto card program—with the introduction of an Artist Accelerator incubator that will prepare emerging artists to “build (and own) their brand through Web 3.0 experiences like minting NFTs.”.

Although Telegram’s own blockchain project fell afoul of regulators in 2020, it has since allowed The Open Network Foundation (TON Foundation) to take the lead in an ecosystem that supports a growing number of blockchain applications on Telegram. In 2023, a third-party provider, ‘The Open Platform’

(TOP)—yes, the acronyms have a theme—launched a ‘wallet’ enabling users to make in-app payments with a range of cryptoassets simply by sending messages to the ‘wallet bot’.

Starbucks launched its NFT loyalty programme ‘Odyssey’ in December 2022 and has released a few thousand NFTs in 2023. The technology allows customers to collect NFT loyalty ‘stamps’, which they can redeem for surprise gifts, in effect offering lucky dip tickets that collectors can resell. It has yet to be determined whether they turn out to be a bust or the next great thing.

Who’s Working On it?

In September 2023, Sony, the multinational technology group, announced its rather bold intention to develop “a blockchain that can become the backbone of global Web 3.0 infrastructure” through a joint venture with Startale Labs. We await further details.

The London Stock Exchange Group is also thinking big. Being the first big exchange to provide significant trading of conventional financial assets on blockchain technology is a goal they are actively working toward. Hopefully, they will learn from the rather painful failure of their Australian counterpart.

In keeping with the trend of banks investing in blockchain, Swift—the global communication platform for the largest banks in the world—finished a series of tests in August to demonstrate that it could deliver its services across various blockchains. This is crucial for the scaling of financial use cases for blockchain.

Brand Watch concludes with one last financial player: The massive asset management Blackrock has put in an application with its regulator to establish a spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) that would contain bitcoin and follow its price. They hope to succeed where others, so far, have failed. They certainly have the brand cache, industry nous, and scale to pull it off.

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