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Cryptocurrency is gaining terrain in racing. It was announced this week that Crypto.com has signed a deal with Formula One racing worth roughly $100 million. With the deal, Crypto.com gets top-branding options with the organization including roadside billboards for the remainder of this racing season, ensuring racing fans around the world to take note. This is already the second big deal made by Crypto.com in the world of professional race car driving. In March of this year the website partnered with the Aston Martin Cognizant Formula One team, which led to a brand new series of NFT (non-fungible tokens). Crypto.com is not the only business in the crypto space that have entered Formula One racing. In May, Red Bull Racing partnered up with the energy efficient blockchain, Tezos, in a multi-year deal. Earlier in the year McLaren Racing partnered with Turkish cryptocurrency exchange, Bitci.com. In the press release, Stefano Domenicali, President and Chief Executive Officer of Formula 1, stated: “We are pleased to welcome Crypto.com to the Formula 1 family, as we continue to attract progressive global brands anchored in performance and innovation.” Crypto.com’s Chief Marketing Officer, Steve Kalifowitz commented on the deal during an interview with Forbes magazine: “We worked closely with on content creation, strategy, and bringing our customers valuable content. People were able to buy, as collectibles, the first videos and moments of Sebastian and Lance driving the new car. Our customers will get special access to Aston Martin and F1 in general. Will those be extended from the NFTs directly? Those are the things that are still under discussion, but the whole industry is still experimenting and figuring out what works for different properties… You would not have imagined two years ago that a company like Aston Martin in Formula One joined Crypto.com in a partnership, and where crypto was shunned earlier because they were not sure about it, people are embracing it now and seeing it is good technology that can solve a lot of problems when applied properly.” A different ball-game Kalifowitz continued and said that crypto has been shunned over the past few years given how volatile it has been and how often coins go up and down. He sais that even though Bitcoin is seeing some significant drops similar to 2017, crypto has garnered a much more solid reputation due to a growing institutional presence and that today constitutes a whole different scene: “After the dot com bubble burst, that is when we got social media and the biggest companies of today: Facebook, Twitter and others. In those years, a lot was built, and the internet matured. You are seeing a lot of that today with cryptocurrency. Crypto had its bubble moment in 2017 and then people forgot about it for a while… The crypto industry has matured. Adults are running the show, now… The difference between now and in 2017 is there are institutions in the game, and they are less jittery than retail. It is a lot more sophisticated and a lot of naysayers in 2017 have come around to it.”

Red Bull

Crypto.com Signs $100 Million Deal with Formula One