Coin Healthcheck: Chiliz (CHZ)

About

Chiliz (CHZ) is the world’s first blockchain-based crypto for the sports and entertainment industries. The platform allows sports fans to engage with their teams via Fan Tokens while offering a new way for sports teams to monetize their audiences.

CHZ is the native token of Chiliz and the main cryptocurrency of Socios.com, a sports fan engagement app, which runs on top of Chiliz’s infrastructure.

Launched back in 2018, the Malta-based project has signed multiple contracts with the world’s leading sports clubs today.

State of Project

Chiliz enables direct engagement between fans and their favorite sports teams by allowing fans to support their favorite teams by buying Fan Tokens with Chiliz native CHZ tokens.
The Chiliz (CHZ) sports crypto is both an ERC20 utility token on the Ethereum blockchain and a BEP20 token on Binance Smart Chain.
Users can buy branded Fan Tokens on the fan engagement platform Socios.com. Holding Fan Tokens allows users to have an influence on their beloved team governance via direct voting.
Fan Tokens are specific for a team or a club and are minted using the Chiliz blockchain via a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus algorithm.
Chiliz.net is the world’s first cryptocurrency exchange for sports.

The Website and Whitepaper

The official website does not provide a link to the whitepaper. Anyone though can find the link to the Chiliz whitepaper, a lengthy 66-page PDF, on the internet.

Development Stage

Chiliz partnered with Web3 developers Ankr to develop the Chiliz Chain 2.0 (CC2) network. CC2 should support NFT issuance and staking, increase the utility of the CHZ token, and make it the main token for paying network fees. Chiliz plans to launch its network upgrade within the first quarter of 2022.

Since 2020, Chiliz has been in collaboration with Sandbox Metaverse on a hub for fans of various sports clubs.

Socios.com has signed 110 partnerships with sports teams and clubs from 25 countries. Partnerships include multiple teams and clubs from football, baseball, basketball, NASCAR, and Formula-1 racing.

Integration with Chainlink, a decentralized oracle network, to create real-time NFTs aimed at commemorating special sports events.

Chiliz opened a New York office and invested $50 million in 2021 in order to launch Fan Tokens with leading franchises from the five major U.S. sports leagues.

Fundraising

Chiliz issued its CHZ sports crypto token via private placement at a price of $0.0215, raising over $66 million. The company said it will never have a public token sale.

Roadmap

Chiliz has not provided any official roadmap beyond Q3 of 2020.

Team

Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO of Chiliz and Socios.com, with more than 20 years of experience in the gaming and sports industries. Previously co-founded one of the largest online poker sites in France, Winamax as well as the first European city guide network, Webcity.

The company has a team of more than 100 employees and an advisory board comprising multiple business and esports experts.

Key investors: Binance, VC firms Ceyuan Ventures, Jump Capital, and Kosmos Capital.

Community

Social media accounts: Twitter (431.4K), Telegram (24.2K), Facebook (10.4K), Weibo (4.2K), Discord (333)

Communication is active and regular.

Key Metrics

Maximum supply: 8,888,888,888 CHZ

Circulating supply: 5.98 billion CHZ

Market Cap: $1.2 billion

All-time high (ATH): $0.878633 (March 2021)

All-time low (ATL): $0.00410887 (September 2019)

Markets

Available to buy on 100 cryptocurrency trading platforms, including the biggest crypto exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, FTX, Kraken etc.

Wallets

ERC20 and BEP20 compatible wallets.

Token allocation

7.5% of CHZ supply is dedicated to seed investors, 5% to the project’s team, 3% to the advisory board. 15% of supply goes to strategic acquisitions, another 15% is dedicated to marketing operations.

Over 135,341 wallets hold CHZ tokens.

82% of CHZ supply is held in the hands of whales, or wallets holding more than 1% of CHZ max supply.

Verdict

Although Chiliz was the first blockchain-based fan engagement solution for the sports industry, it is not the only one anymore. Decentralized technologies brought the ability for sports teams to generate new revenue streams, and increase fan engagement. This means a bigger demand for Chiliz, but also more severe competition, especially from the NFT sector, which could be one of the major obstacles to Chiliz’s future expansion.
On the other hand, Chiliz has almost 4 years of experience, the product, contracts, partnerships with the biggest names in the sports industry, and fully functioning infrastructure as competitive advantages.
Although heavily involved with the European sports industry, Chiliz started to make its first steps into the United States sports market last year. The company sees the US market as the top priority in its global growth plans.
With a $1.2 billion market cap, Chiliz (CHZ) ranks as the 73rd coin at the time of writing. It is not a small market cap coin anymore, and it still has high growth potential, especially in terms of sports crypto.