On May 3, the price of Algorand jumped 15%. The reason: the news that it entered into a sponsorship agreement with FIFA. The deal is about more than just money: Algorand will also become the official blockchain platform of FIFA and will set up a FIFA wallet.

Algorand states that it will also help FIFA with its digital assets strategy. FIFA has a turnover of around 4 billion dollars (2018 figures). Of course, in return, FIFA offers space on billboards at the men's World Cup in Qatar at the end of this year and at the women's World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, in 2023.

What is Algorand?

Algorand (ALGO) is a proof-of-stake blockchain set up in 2017 by an MIT professor with many cryptography patents to his name. The development of the protocol is monitored by the company Algorand inc. Algorand is one of the crypto projects that has set itself the goal of solving the blockchain trilemma: the ideal compromise between scalability, security and decentralization (Fantom, for example, has also explicitly set itself this goal).

A breakthrough for Algorand was that it was used by El Salvador in 2021 as the blockchain on which the Chivo payment app runs. Algorand was also used to allow banks to accept BTC. Quite a remarkable fact when you consider that Bitcoin needs the help of another blockchain.

More big crypto sponsorship deals

It won't be the first or last time you see the logo of a crypto industry company at sporting events. Because crypto is such a raging growth market and because the competition is so fierce, companies are competing to be on that car, or on that shirt or billboard.

For example, trading platform Bybit closed a mega deal with Formula 1 racing stable Red Bull in early 2022. The deal involved £111 million. Crypto.com's deal with basketball team Los Angeles Lakers was also impressive. The company is rumored to be paying 700 million over a twenty-year period. This buys it the rights to the name of the stadium. With the deal, it surpasses FTX, which previously became the namesake of Miami Heat's stadium for 210 million.