Brazilian Sports Club Flamengo Partners With Crypto Payments Platform MoonPay

One of Brazil's largest sports clubs, Clube de Regatas do Flamengo or simply Flamengo, has teamed up with crypto payments platform MoonPay and confirmed that it would debut numerous Web3 products via a multi-year partnership deal.

"MoonPay will help Flamengo leverage NFTs and Web3 to deepen fan engagement," the announcement from the fiat on-ramping service-turned-Web3 infrastructure provider said Thursday.

The crypto payments platform has been appointed as a major sponsor of Flamengo's basketball team, whose new season is set to start this month.

"NFTs and Web3 technology have helped increase fan engagement and loyalty as well as create new revenue streams worth hundreds of millions of dollars for sports teams around the world," Ivan Soto-Wright, MoonPay's co-founder and chief executive officer, said in the announcement. "MoonPay's partnership with Flamengo can take that innovation to a whole new level. We're excited to work hand-in-hand with the team to transform the business of sports."

The announcement also confirmed that Soto-Wright visited the headquarters of Flamengo in Rio and watched Flamengo's match against Internacional at the Maracanã stadium. The sports club displayed the new basketball jersey for the 2022-23 season, which featured new sponsors.

"This initial agreement with MoonPay, an innovative American technology company, has the potential to become a great long-term partnership," Gustavo Oliveira, Flamengo's vice president of marketing and communications, said in the announcement.

It can be recalled that MoonPay raised $555 million and was valued at $3.4 billion in its very first financial funding round in 2021 led by Tiger Global Management and hedge fund Coatue.

This partnership with Flamengo officially marks MoonPay's entry into Brazil, which reportedly has more than 34.5 million people who use cryptocurrencies or invest in them.

Interestingly, Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange, also wanted to "expand its presence" in the country and opened offices in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. It even plans to spread over 150 employees across the two offices.