SportFi has spent most of its life in a familiar lane: tokens that reward fandom with voting rights, perks and a thin layer of speculative trading. The next version being mapped out by some of the sector’s biggest builders suggests a more ambitious destination — one where sports become a live data feed for smart contracts, and tokens behave less like collectibles and more like programmable markets.

The logic is simple: sports already produce constant, globally understood outcomes. Win, lose, qualify, get relegated — the “settlement layer” is the scoreboard. If token supply and incentives can be tied to those outcomes, SportFi starts to resemble a gamified asset class rather than a bolt-on engagement product.

One roadmap outlined by sports-focused blockchain firm Chiliz frames this shift as “gamified tokenomics”: match-day results would trigger mint-and-burn mechanics, for example, burning supply on wins or expanding it on losses, executed transparently through smart contracts.

"Our journey is about trying to become like a sentiment marketplace above these tokens and making them available everywhere so developers can create tools where we can indeed play with these tokens as a sentiment game," Chiliz CEO Alexandre Dreyfus told CoinDesk in an interview.

Dreyfus pitched it less as gambling and more as a sentiment marketplace that mirrors sport’s competitive rhythm: seasonal, event-driven and reactive to real-world performance.

That matters because it changes who the product is for. Fan tokens have typically leaned on a sense of "ownership" in a team, such as voting on the colour of the club's warm-up kit and what song plays in the stadium as the players walk out. Trading activity, however, has often been driven by headline moments — signings, managerial changes, tournament runs.

A rules-based, outcome-linked supply model is designed to formalize that behaviour into the token itself, making price formation and scarcity part of the match-day experience rather than an accidental byproduct.

Intersection with prediction markets

If that layer works, it opens the door to the next one: DeFi around sports-native assets. In practice, that means building the plumbing for tokens to be used as collateral, traded in deeper liquidity pools, or packaged into structured products, a step toward sports assets behaving like other crypto primitives.

It’s also where SportFi begins to intersect with prediction markets, without trying to become one. “We are investing in making our fan tokens more gamified. So, maybe I’m betting on Polymarket that Barcelona is going to beat Paris Saint-Germain, but then maybe I’m going to hedge that by buying the fan token of Barca,” Dreyfus said.

The idea is that fan tokens could become another instrument for match outcomes: a liquid, tradable expression of sentiment that can sit alongside event contracts rather than replace them.

The longer-term arc is even more conventional and potentially more transformative. Sports organizations are famously asset-rich and cash-poor, sitting on valuable media rights, brand IP and stadium economics while managing volatile costs. Tokenization could turn those future cash flows into on-chain instruments, giving clubs alternative liquidity routes beyond banks and specialized funds. Decentral, a Chilliz-based protocol, is tokenizing future receivables such as broadcasting rights, allowing teams to receive stablecoin liquidity.

None of this is guaranteed. Regulation will define how far SportFi can go, especially when tokens resemble gambling, as prediction markets have found out.

Nevertheless, SportFi’s journey shows signs of evolving from simply putting a badge on a blockchain into using smart contracts to translate sports’ real-world outcomes and, eventually, their real-world cash flows into programmable financial markets.