• Blockchain company Socios has partnered with football club Juventus to launch a $JUV token.
• Fans can buy the token and use it to vote on which song the club will play in the Allianz stadium.
• Yet another example of a project that doesn’t need a blockchain or a token.

File this under: things that absolutely don’t need a blockchain.

Juventus fans can now vote on which song will be played at the Allianz stadium when Ronaldo or Dybala score. The catch? You need to buy $JUV tokens through the blockchain platform Socios to do it.

I wonder if they… thought of doing a Twitter poll instead?

You don’t need a blockchain for that

Socios, which raised $27 million from investors , aims to give sports fans more decision-making power over the clubs they love. The company has partnered with Juventus, West Ham, and Athletico Madrid to give fans ‘voting rights’ on club decisions (so far, just a choice of goal celebration song).

But to do so, fans are forced to purchase the ‘Fan Token’ $JUV. The token costs €2 but as soon as you buy it, your money is exchanged to Socios’ Chiliz (CHZ) token – a highly volatile and illiquid token listed on Binance.

To put it into perspective, CHZ lost 60% of its value in two months between July to September .

It’s an absurdly complicated and unnecessary way for fans to participate in their favourite teams. Not to mention, it adds considerable financial danger by linking the tokens to a volatile asset.

It’s like the 2017 crypto bubble all over again

These type of projects popped up almost every day through the 2017 cryptocurrency bubble. Projects with no true need for a token convinced naive retail investors to invest through the promise of blockchain technology. After $30 billion in ICO raises, there’s almost nothing to show for it.

It has since become clear that blockchain technology has little real world application  beyond the transfer of censorship-resistant money, i.e. bitcoin.

Blockchains aren’t a desirable thing… blockchains must be expensive to operate, to work effectively. This makes it a last-resort solution, when you truly have no other options available for solving your problem; in almost every case you want a cheaper and less complex solution than a blockchain.

If Juventus and Socios truly wanted to improve fan engagement, they’d use a basic polling app. And if they wanted to give fans meaningful voting rights, they could open up real investment channels through equity crowdfunding.

Instead, this Juventus project is little more than a headline full of blockchain buzzwords, created to enrich the entities that launched it.