The Sunshine Tour, a South African golf competition, will offer a portion of its awards in Bitcoin (BTC). This novelty is made possible thanks to an agreement with Luno, a cryptocurrency exchange platform.
Bitcoin to be won in golf competition
As part of an agreement with Luno, a cryptocurrency exchange platform, South Africa’s premier golf competition will feature Bitcoin (BTC) winnings.
The Sunshine Tour is effectively the major tour in Southern Africa for professional golf. With this new agreement, the ranking, named Order of Merit, will allow the top competitors to receive Bitcoin in their Luno account.
The prizes are as follows for first through third place at the end of the season:
- 500,000 (approximately $31,000);
- 200,000 rand (about $12,000);
- 100,000 rand (about $6,000).
Thomas Abt, Sunshine Tour Commissioner, said of the partnership:
“Luno is a brand that fits our strong digital focus and the new, younger audience we are reaching, and we are delighted to welcome them to the Sunshine Tour.”
Luno is a centralized exchange with a presence in several countries such as South Africa, the UK and Australia and has 10 million users worldwide.
The platform had made news last year for publishing an advertising campaign in the London Underground with the inscription “If you see Bitcoin on the Underground, it’s time to buy it”.
A growing presence in the sports world
Golf is not the first sport to set up prizes in Bitcoin, we have for example already seen it recently in MMA with Crypto.com. In fact, it is becoming difficult to list all the ads putting sports and cryptocurrencies together, as they are becoming so frequent.
To illustrate this trend, we can mention FIFA, which announced last week that Algorand (ALGO) was becoming its official blockchain and would be one of the sponsors of the 2022 soccer world cup. In the same sport, Lionel Messi became, at the end of March, the ambassador of Socios.com.
In basketball, the club of Pau has put on sale a part of its capital in the form of Security Token and the NBA has launched its collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT). Through these few examples, we can see that golf is added to the list of sports joining the blockchain universe, logically following a trend that seems to last.
