What started as a joke in 2013 can score you seats at a Dallas Mavericks game today.
The Mavericks will now accept Dogecoin as a currency to pay for tickets and merchandise. Fans must be members of the team’s Mavs Fans For Life club to partake.
Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency that was created to playfully mock blockchain tokens, but it suddenly shot up in value this year and received publicity boosts from Elon Musk and Snoop Dogg. It now has a market cap of $6 billion.
Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban said the team is doing this for “one very important, earth-shattering reason, because we can!” He believes that “sometimes in business you have to do things that are fun, engaging, and hopefully generate a lot of PR. So we will take Dogecoin today, tomorrow, and possibly forever more.”
- The team will use the service BitPay to process purchases using Dogecoin.
- Dogecoin opened the year priced at around half-a-penny per token, grew 16-fold in February, and settled back down to around five cents apiece as of Thursday.
- The Mavs began accepting Bitcoin in 2019.
Blockchain tokens have become serious business for the league. NBA Top Shot, which sells blockchain-backed video highlights, reached $45 million in sales in one 24-hour period in February and still sees around $10 million in transactions per day.
Cuban advised people who want to learn more about crypto to “talk to your teenagers who are on TikTok and ask them about it.”
