Cristiano Ronaldo has entered into a multi-year joint marketing agreement with the crypto company Binance. As part of the deal announced today, more Ronaldo NFT collections will be produced in each year of the agreement and released exclusively on the Binance NFT marketplace.
“Together we will give you the opportunity to own an iconic piece of sporting history,” Ronaldo wrote in an announcement post on Thursday.
Ronaldo’s first NFTs for Binance are expected to go on sale later this year. NFTs are blockchain-based tokens that show ownership over digital or physical assets.
“My relationship with the fans is very important to me, so the idea of bringing unprecedented experiences and access through this NFT platform is something I wanted to be a part of,” Ronaldo said in a statement.
Ronaldo is the most followed person on Instagram, with 459 million followers. He rose to global fame as a professional footballer, is a five-time FIFA player of the year and has scored above 770 goals in the career. He is also a billionaire and is only 37 years old.
Partnership analysis firm Zoomph shared that Ronaldo’s Twitter and Instagram posts announcing the Binance news received over 48 million views in one hour.
Fan response to the news was mostly positive, although a few naysayers responded to the news by calling NFTs”fraud” and “worthless shit.”
Binance declined Decryptits request for comment on agreement specifics.
Ronaldo’s Binance deal comes just weeks after the company announced it is sponsoring musician The Weeknd’s upcoming world tour, making it “Crypto-powered” along with an NFT fundraiser and a $2 million donation to The Weeknd’s XO Humanitarian Fund under the United Nations World Food Program.
Ironically, all these celebrity deals come as Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao tweeted a week ago that his company had provided expensive sponsorship opportunities that “Super Bowl ads” and “naming rights to the stadium,” which allowed Binance to continue hiring amid the crypto bear market and a rash of company redundancies.
Want to become a crypto expert? Get the best of Decrypt straight to your inbox.
Get the biggest crypto news + weekly recaps and more!
