Crawley Town’s new owners raise £3MILLION in mere hours after WAGMI United NFT launch and partnership with Adidas
CRAWLEY TOWN'S new owners raised more than £3MILLION in a matter of hours thanks to a new NFT launch.
Crypto group WAGMI United, led by Preston Johnson and Eben Smith, completed a takeover of the Red Devils in April.
And their new project - in partnership with Adidas - went live on Friday.
The idea sees fans purchase digital assets giving access to a raft of perks including voting rights on club decisions, merchandise, exclusive experiences and digital content.
So far more than 9,000 of the "non-fungible tokens" have been bought using a cryptocurrency called Ether - at a cost of roughly £355 a pop.
Crawley co-chairman Johnson told a Twitter live chat: "We're going to offer via this technology unprecedented access into the way a club functions day to day, week to week.
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"Whether that's access to watching training sessions, the office with the head coach or a stream from the dugout.
"Whether it's deciding what position we put funds towards in the transfer window or where we're putting funds for events.
"If you have this NFT you're going to have a say in all the big-picture items for a football club that's trying to tell a story to get to the Premier League."
The huge number of sales is nearly four times Crawley's average League Two attendance last season.
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And it makes a mockery of the current crypto market downturn that has seen much cheaper NFT projects struggling to sell.
WAGMI United - which stands for We’re All Gonna Make It - also vowed to reinvest all the money raised into improving the Broadfield Stadium club.
The club has already signed League Two’s 25-goal top-scorer Dom Telford from Newport this summer. As well as highly rated defenders Travis Johnson and Dion Conroy.