Chiliz grows staff by 70% despite crypto winter, says CEO

Blockchain company Chiliz has recorded an increase in its workforce over the past few months despite the crypto winter.

Chiliz, the company that created the fan token platform Socios.com, has been expanding its workforce over the past few months. 

Chiliz and Socios.com CEO Alexandre Dreyfus told Cointelegraph in a recent interview that the company’s headcount has increased by 70% despite the bear market.

The CEO added that the company now has over 300 full-time employees working from the new offices that opened earlier this year. The offices are in the cities of London, Switzerland, Miami, Milan, and Sao Paulo. 

Socios.com has listed some of the best football fan tokens on its platform, including Paris Saint Germain (PSG) and Lazio. 

Dreyfus added that Chiliz has also been hiring new talent for its offices in Istanbul, Lyon, Madrid, and Malta. He said;

“We’ve grown our team and our global presence very significantly. We have been through market conditions similar to this in the past.”

Chiliz was founded in 2018 and was around for the last bear market, he added. 

Fan tokens have become very popular in the cryptocurrency and sports industries. Several football clubs, including FC Barcelona, have launched their fan tokens. According to data collected from the industry data aggregator CryptoSlam, monthly volumes for global fan token sales increased by 200% since early 2022, reaching about $6.4 billion last month. In January 2022, these volumes amounted to $2.2 billion.

Scalability could be a major reason why fan tokens have been performing well since the start of the year. Dreyfus commented that;

“Fan tokens are the only digital asset that can affordably deliver the scalability to allow millions of users to access these communities.”

When asked about fan tokens and how they differ from nonfungible tokens (NFTs), the Chiliz boss said;

“NFTs have been lauded for their many use cases, with the ability to form communities around token holders. The issue is, minting even a few thousand NFTs is a very expensive pursuit.”

Dreyfus added that the idea behind fan tokens is not to compete with NFTs. Instead, he believes that fan tokens complement NFTs. he revealed that Chiliz has a robust strategy around NFTs as they would play a crucial role in the company’s long-term strategy. He said;

“It’s not about beating NFTs. Fan tokens are a product, and NFTs are a technology, one that’s an integral part of our product offering. They are one of the ways we reward fan tokenholders.”

CHZ, the native coin of Chiliz, is up by nearly 3% in the last 24 hours and is currently trading at $0.1854.