In June 2014, on The Bitcoin Group #35, the panel looked at BitPay buying the naming rights to a college football bowl game and said plainly: "Bitcoin and sports is a no brainer… it's a logical progression." Twelve years later that call has been vindicated at a scale nobody on that show proposed — and the specific vehicle they were celebrating collapsed within a single year.
BitPay announced the St. Petersburg Bowl deal on 18 June 2014. Two days later The Bitcoin Group took it apart on air. The panel did not treat it as a novelty — they treated it as the first instance of a category.
"So yeah, the bowl game is awesome. Bitcoin and sports is a no brainer. You saw that earlier this year with the college [kid] to raise 24 grand by holding up a QR code on NFL — or rather ESPN game day — for college athletics. So it's a logical progression. It's really exciting."
TBG The Bitcoin Group #35 — "Privatize the Pound! / Silk Road Bidders / BitGo $12M" · 20 June 2014
The reasoning offered was reach and normalisation, not price speculation:
"This is the most popular sport in America by a large margin. It's the most popular college sport in America as well. This is huge visibility. … It'll be echoed constantly ad nauseam on all the sports commentating shows throughout the fall and around the holiday time… this is good for bringing Bitcoin to a lot more people… or will start having a sense of normalization around it. If they previously were averse to it because of its association with, say, the Silk Road… or Mt. Gox."
TBG The Bitcoin Group #35 · 20 June 2014
There was scepticism on the same show, and it deserves equal billing — because it also turned out to be right. One panelist reached for the Power Balance precedent, a company that bought a stadium name and sold nobody anything:
"They sponsored a stadium and so it's called Power Balance Stadium and sports were played there, and I don't think anybody went out and bought a Power Balance bracelet because this stadium was named after it."
TBG The Bitcoin Group #35 · 20 June 2014
Footnote for the archive: searching the transcripts for "Bitcoin bowl" also surfaces a genuinely different event — the BitGive charity bowling tournament of June 2014, where teams from Xapo and BitPay actually bowled against each other ("we're all from Xapo here, just want to let everyone know we're going to crush the competition"). Same phrase, different sport. MB 8–9 June 2014.
The show covered this deal from announcement to autopsy. The arc is unusually complete.
| Date | Episode | Beat |
|---|---|---|
| 18 Jun 2014 | — | BitPay signs a three-year title-sponsor deal with ESPN Events for the St. Petersburg Bowl |
| 20 Jun 2014 | TBG #35 | "Bitcoin and sports is a no brainer" — the call, plus the Power Balance counter-argument |
| 20 Nov 2014 | MB — Connie Gallippi (BitGive) interview | Fan zone, bitcoin ATMs, "the stadium takes Bitcoin" |
| 8 Dec 2014 | MB — "Good News and then Bad News" | "It's official. The Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl will feature UCF versus NC State." |
| 24 Dec 2014 | MB — Christmas Special 2014 | "What if I told you there was going to be a Bitcoin football game? Hashtag Bitcoin Bowl." |
| 26 Dec 2014 | — | The game is played. NC State 34, UCF 27 — Tropicana Field, St. Petersburg |
| 5 Jan 2015 | MB — "ESPN Sells Out" | ESPN dumped the bitcoin it was paid, before the crash |
| 10 Jan 2015 | TBG #62 | Year in Review: BitPay named best Bitcoin company of 2014 |
| Apr 2015 | — | ESPN and BitPay part ways after one year of a three-year deal |
On the interview with Connie Gallippi of the BitGive Foundation, the ambition was laid out plainly — and so was the comedy of it:
"It's sponsored by BitPay. And it's three years — they're going to do the Bitcoin Bowls, the college playoff game in St. Petersburg… There's going to be like a whole fan zone… there'll be the ATMs… The stadium takes Bitcoin. … it's a pretty big deal to see Bitcoin and ESPN partnering."
"So it sounds like a big nerd fest. I don't think anyone's going to watch the football game at all."
MB MadBitcoins interviews Connie Gallippi from BitGive · 20 November 2014
Then the punchline, ten days after the game — and this is the single sharpest piece of reporting in the whole arc:
"ESPN makes fast cash on Bitcoin payment. It turns out that when it comes to reading the tea leaves of the market, you can trust the sports leader. ESPN. The Bristol-based company dumped all $500,000 of the Bitcoins they received for the Bitcoin Bowl before the crash. Now, if only they could predict sports scores as well as they could predict stock prices — we'd all be rich."
MB "Bitstamp Hacked! / California approves Bitcoin / ESPN Sells Out" · 5 January 2015
The 2014 Year in Review episode reached a verdict that still reads well — note the emphasis on what the reaction revealed rather than on the game itself:
"Things like the Bitcoin Bowl — they've done what only they could do and what no other Bitcoin company could do. And that's get on primetime national television on cable, get three million eyes… BitPay is the best Bitcoin company of 2014 for sponsoring the Bitcoin Bowl and national media success on ESPN, and for not putting their name on it. A rare occasion of a corporation acting for the good of Bitcoin."
"The general reaction was 'Bitcoin has enough money to sponsor a bowl game', which completely opened their eyes to the fact that Bitcoin is a huge ecosystem with incredible companies operating within it… People felt like a proud parent watching the Bitcoin Bowl, even if they hated sports."
TBG The Bitcoin Group #62 — 2014 Year in Review Spectacular · 10 January 2015
And the critique, six months later, which identified the actual structural failure of merchant-adoption marketing:
"The real problem when you look at an event like the Bitcoin Bowl is that they did a great job with half of their project. They went around asking a bunch of merchants to accept it. They got them tablets. They showed them how to use the tablets. They did a good job. The other half of that is getting customers for those merchants."
TBG The Bitcoin Group #72 · 10 July 2015
"The merchant-first adoption plan has failed. They can build it, but without any customers it's just an empty stadium. We need to fill that stadium up first before we can see a show."
TBG The Bitcoin Group #70 · 26 June 2015
The category the show identified in 2014 did arrive — but the money came from exchanges buying mainstream legitimacy, not from payment processors driving merchant adoption. Every row below is externally verified; see sources.
| Deal | Year | Terms | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| BitPay — Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl | 2014 | 3-year ESPN Events title sponsorship, ~$500K/yr (~$1.5M), paid in bitcoin | Ended after 1 game |
| FTX — Miami Heat arena | 2021 | 19 years, $135M naming rights; $2M/yr to the Heat | Terminated in bankruptcy, Nov 2022 |
| Crypto.com — Staples Center → Crypto.com Arena | 2021 | $700M — largest naming-rights deal in US history | Active |
| Coinbase — NBA / WNBA / G League / 2K League / USA Basketball | 2021 | Multiyear; exclusive cryptocurrency platform partner — a first for every one of those leagues | Active |
| Coinbase — LA Clippers | 2025 | Team-level sponsorship | Active |
| Coinbase — Las Vegas Desert Dogs (NLL lacrosse) | — | Jersey branding; Wayne Gretzky is a team co-owner | Branding confirmed, terms not public |
| Kraken — Atlético de Madrid | 2024 | Official Crypto & Web3 Partner; official sleeve partner, men's and women's shirts | Active |
| Kraken — FIFA World Cup 2026 | 2026 | Official crypto partner of the tournament | Active |
| Kraken — Williams F1, Tottenham Hotspur, RB Leipzig | various | Multi-sport European portfolio | Active |
"Bitcoin and sports is a no brainer… a logical progression" (TBG #35, June 2014). Crypto sponsorship is now a permanent fixture of major-league sport: an exclusive NBA partnership, the largest arena naming-rights deal in US history, a LaLiga sleeve, and an official FIFA World Cup partner. The show called the category eighteen months before the first bull-market wave and seven years before the deals got big.
The panel argued the value was visibility and dispelling the Silk Road association — "a sense of normalization around it" — rather than fans actually paying in bitcoin. Every major deal since has been an exchange buying brand legitimacy. None of them are merchant-payment plays. BitPay, a payments company, was the outlier, and it is the one that didn't last.
TBG #70's critique of merchant-first adoption (June 2015) describes what happened to bitcoin-as-payments generally. Merchants were onboarded; customers never came. The metaphor was literal at the Bowl: the stadium accepted bitcoin, and that changed nothing.
Repeated on air as fact, because BitPay and ESPN announced it as a three-year deal. It ran one game. The parties parted ways in April 2015. Notably, ESPN's own treasury behaviour was the tell — it converted the $500,000 in bitcoin immediately, which the show caught on 5 January 2015 and correctly read as a market signal.
"I don't think anybody went out and bought a Power Balance bracelet because this stadium was named after it." Correct about conversion — naming rights don't sell product. But wrong about durability: Crypto.com and Coinbase have held their placements for years. FTX is the purest vindication of the warning — 19 years contracted, 17 months served.
The 2014 discussion assumed the risk was Bitcoin embarrassing itself on national television — that announcers would mock it, that the association with Mt. Gox would resurface. The panel was braced for reputational damage flowing from crypto to sport.
What actually happened ran the other way. The sponsorships worked as advertising and then became a liability for the hosts: Miami-Dade County going to bankruptcy court to strip a failed exchange's name off a public arena is a category of risk that simply wasn't on the table in that June 2014 conversation. The show worried about being laughed at. The real exposure was counterparty risk landing on the team.