Fighters competing at the big UFC White House event on June 14th have a chance to win bonuses totaling one million dollars … worth of crypto.
That’s the big news from UFC and their longtime ‘Official Fight Kit Partner’ Crypto.com, whose logo is prominently displayed on all UFC fighter kit shirts.
“As co-presenting partner of the historic event, as well as to celebrate its own 10-year anniversary, Crypto.com will create a $1 million bonus pool to be awarded to selected fighters on the UFC FREEDOM 250
card that will be paid out in CRO, the native cryptocurrency of the Cronos ecosystem,” a press release from the UFC read. “Based on exchange rates as of Friday, April 10, one million USD is approximately 14.4 million CRO.”
“The CRO bonus will be in addition to the traditional Fight of the Night and Performance bonuses awarded to athletes by UFC President and CEO Dana White following the event. Details regarding how fighters can achieve the CRO bonus will be announced at a later date.”
This isn’t the first time Crypto.com has teamed up with UFC to pay fighters bonuses in crypto. Back in 2022, the UFC announced a ‘Fan Bonus of the Night’ system that would award bitcoin bonuses to the top three fighters on each UFC pay-per-view as voted on by fans. Those payments were worth $30k in bitcoin for first place, $20k for second, and $10k for third. That system seemed to last just a few events, from UFC 273 to UFC 278.
Crypto.com also worked with the UFC to release NFTs … right around the same time the entire NFT market collapsed.
This time around Crypto.com isn’t paying out in bitcoin but instead CRO, which is the currency the site encourages its users to use. We’re waiting to hear from the crypto bros as to whether this seems like a good stable coin, but we’re sure we’ll hear a whole bunch of glowing hype about CRO on UFC broadcasts leading up to the UFC White House event.
We’re all for fighters getting more money, even in mysterious crypto form. It would have been nice though if UFC and Crypto.com nailed down a few more details before this announcement, like, I dunno … how many fighters this $1 million will be split amongst and what the metric for being chosen actually is?
