Blockchain firm Chiliz, creator of fan token platform Socios.com, has continued to broaden its workforce regardless of the continuing bear market, reflecting a rising development within the fan token sector.

The complete cryptocurrency market has seen an enormous sell-off in 2022, with the overall market cap plummeting 60% year-to-date. Some main crypto firms, together with Coinbase and Gemini, have needed to minimize their workforce by 10% to twenty% to stay operational and proceed to serve their prospects.

Whereas a lot of crypto firms have confronted challenges throughout the cryptocurrency winter, the fan token business appears to have proven some resilience.

Chiliz has elevated the corporate’s headcount by over 70% this 12 months as the corporate continued to broaden its international footprint in 2022, Alexandre Dreyfus, CEO of Chiliz and Socios.com, informed Cointelegraph.

In accordance with Dreyfus, Chiliz’s workforce now totals greater than 300 full-time staff working from the brand new places of work that opened this 12 months within the cities of Miami, Switzerland, London, Milan and Sao Paulo. The agency has additionally employed new expertise for places of work in Madrid, Malta, Lyon and Istanbul.

“We’ve got drastically elevated our workforce and international footprint,” stated Dreyfus, including that Chiliz efficiently weathered the final main crypto winter. “We have been by means of related market situations previously,” he defined, noting that the corporate was based in 2018.

Chiliz’s hiring wave displays a rising development within the fan token business in 2022. In accordance with information from business information aggregator CryptoSlam, the month-to-month quantity of world fan token gross sales has elevated by about 200% for the reason that starting of 2022, reaching about $6.4 billion in September. In January, these volumes totaled $2.2 billion.

Month-to-month quantity of world fan token gross sales year-to-date. Supply: CryptoSlam

Whereas gross sales quantity of fan tokens has elevated, the development has been reversed for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), in keeping with CryptoSlam information. Month-to-month volumes for international NFT gross sales shrank 88% from $4.8 billion in January to $550 million in September 2022, whereas trading volumes fell 98% year-to-date.

In accordance with Dreyfus, scalability may very well be one of many attainable causes for the success of the fan token business. “Fan tokens are the one digital property that may present the scalability to permit thousands and thousands of customers to entry these communities,” he stated.

In contrast to NFTs, fan tokens are fungible digital property, that means they’re interchangeable and every token has the identical value always. Dreyfus defined:

“NFTs have been lauded for his or her many use instances, with the flexibility to construct communities round token holders. The issue is that minting even a couple of thousand NFTs is a really costly endeavor.”

The CEO identified that fan tokens usually are not meant to beat NFTs as these two kinds of tokens have a tendency to enrich one another. Dreyfus additionally talked about that Chiliz has a strong technique in the direction of NFTs as they play an necessary position of their company imaginative and prescient, stating:

“It isn’t about beating NFTs. Fan tokens are a product and NFTs are a know-how that’s an integral a part of our product providing. They’re one of many methods we reward fan token holders.”

Regardless of some developments within the NFT business, Chiliz stays dedicated to fan tokens as the corporate’s principal focus. “We nonetheless have lower than 1% of our potential,” Dreyfus added.

Associated: Crypto.com is downsizing some esports partnerships amid market downturn

Fan tokens are a sort of cryptocurrency designed to supply neighborhood advantages to followers of sports activities groups, bands, and different teams. Chiliz platform and fan engagement platform Socios.com have established fan token partnerships with dozens of sports activities organizations worldwide, together with FC Barcelona, ​​​​Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain and others.

In March 2022, Chiliz launched the testnet for its new Layer 1 blockchain community, Chiliz Chain 2.0, also referred to as CC2. The total industrial launch of CC2 is predicted to happen within the fourth quarter of 2022.