Crypto exchanges have been actively involved in the gaming/streaming industry as sponsors since the beginning of 2021. These companies entered into a lot of partnership agreements with both individual streamers and esports organizations. Streams Charts found out that mentions of such companies on Twitch have grown significantly over the past year and identified the most popular ones.
We analyzed the streams that mentioned popular cryptocurrency exchanges in its titles over the last year: from September 2020 to August 2021. Variety of other types of mentions of these companies on Twitch were not included in the metrics.
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Statistics was collected by Wordstat made by Streams Charts: it allows to track viewership numbers of brands on Twitch.
Сrypto exchanges have been partnering with Twitch channels for quite a long time, but this became a global trend in the spring/summer of 2021. For comparison, only 16 Twitch channels could be found mentioning crypto-exchanges in its stream titles in August 2020, but this figure had grown by more than 10 times by early Fall 2021.
The rise of FTX mentions is directly related to the company's deal with TSM: now the crypto exchange is regularly advertised by all of the club's most famous streamers, including Co1azo, Subroza and GM Hikaru Nakamura. No other crypto exchange has that many popular content makers, but FTX rivals are still quite active in the streaming segment. For example, Coinbase has partnered with quite popular independent content maker Jerma985, and Bybit has partnered with TraderSamwise, whose streams are predominantly focused on crypto trading.
There is also a crypto exchange that has not yet been mentioned in this material: BitMEX. The general public may know it as one of the sponsors of the AC Milan football club, but there are also streamers among its partners, albeit not the most famous ones (they are hundreds of times inferior in popularity to TSM content makers).
The distribution of partnered streams by game category is heavily affected by TSM streamers as they are the biggest ones advertising cryptocurrency exchanges on Twitch. However, the most popular category still turned out to be “Crypto”, where professional traders stream regularly: such broadcasts accounted for 18.1% of the total number of hours viewers spent watching sponsored streams. The rest of the categories come in a relatively tight group, with casual games Teamfight Tactics and Valorant taking second and third places. The top 5 also includes Apex Legends and Chess (mostly thanks to Hikaru Nakamura).
In contrast to the situation with bookmaker sponsorships, the vast majority of broadcasts sponsored by crypto exchanges are in English: this number exceeds 97% of the total amount of Hours Watched. Other languages account for less than a percent of total HW: for example, broadcasts in German, which took second place, only accounted for 0.7%.
Related article: Which betting companies are the most active on Twitch?
Biggest crypto exchanges partnerships in esports
Back in April tournament operator BLAST Premier announced a deal with the crypto exchange Coinbase, but the biggest news was in June 2021, when the biggest US esports organization (according to Forbes' estimates) Team SoloMid entered into a partnership with the Hong Kong crypto exchange FTX for a period of 10 years. Multigaming will receive a sum of $210 million: and it's more than the NBA’s Miami Heat team will get, which has signed an agreement with the same company.
TSM's deal with FTX kicked off a series of major crypto exchange partnerships with prominent esports clubs. For example, Coinbase began to cooperate with ESL, BIG and Evil Geniuses, Binance agreed with OG and WePlay, NBX started business relations with Nordavind and Gen.G, Bybit signed deals with Astralis, Alliance, Natus Vincere and Virtus.pro. The latest news is that Crypto.com announced a deal with Fnatic for $15 million.
What’s even more important is that crypto exchanges have been approved by one of the most important actors in the esports market: Riot Games itself. Initially, the League of Legends publisher was skeptical about TSM's deal with FTX, but in early August it announced its own deal with the crypto exchange: FTX will sponsor North American LoL League LCS for the next seven years.
As the managers of crypto exchanges and esports clubs claim, the convergence of the two markets was inevitable: and it will only gain momentum as both markets share mostly the same audience. This means that in the near future we will hear a lot more about similar multimillion-dollar deals, so esports fans should be pleased.
