The BioMedWire Podcast

For his regular weekly brief, Jonathan Keim, Director of Communications at CryptoCurrencyWire, had another trio of fascinating developments to report. He started with the news that ‘FanWide Brings FanChain Crypto to 10,000 Sports Bars Across the United States’.

SportsCastr, the live streaming company backed by the NFL Players Association, recently announced the launch of its FanChain cryptocurrency on FanWide, a platform that helps fans find local game-watch parties for their favorite teams. As part of the launch, sports fans can now earn FanChain tokens, known as ‘FANZ’, for checking into viewing parties at thousands of sports bars across the U.S. The tokens can be redeemed for cash through SportsCastr’s FanWallet (http://ccw.fm/R6uvZ).

In other news, Grayscale has reported another record year. Grayscale, the world’s largest crypto management firm, took in a record $607 million of investment in 2019, more than its total inflows over the past six years (http://ccw.fm/0k0QG).

Finally, the news that ‘Bakkt’s consumer app is coming in 2020, and it’ll look more like PayPal than Coinbase’ should bring cheer to the crypto community. Bakkt’s consumer app will consider any form of value that is digital as digital assets, including cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. This means that the app could also support virtual goods such as loyalty reward points and equities. The possible inclusion of equity trading, a portal for merchants and a wide array of other assets would make the app closer in nature to a traditional fintech product like PayPal than a crypto-native offering that allows retailers to accept bitcoin, like Flexa (http://ccw.fm/C2d1G).