Turn on a Formula 1 race or a Champions League night and you will spot them everywhere: logos of crypto exchanges on cars, jerseys and trackside boards. Over the past few years, companies like Crypto.com, OKX, Kraken and Coinbase have poured hundreds of millions into sponsoring football clubs and F1 teams. It looks like a gold rush, and in many ways it is. From Formula 1’s title boards to Premier League shirt sleeves, digital-asset brands have become one of the loudest voices in modern sports sponsorship. So why exactly are crypto exchanges racing to attach their names to the world’s biggest sports?
It is not only crypto exchanges chasing sports audiences; betting platforms have long done the same. Brands such as oParimatch Canadaperate in the same fan-first space, where crypto sports betting, sports betting apps and online sports betting all compete for attention. Fans check betting odds, follow sports betting Canada markets and watch sports online during every session, and sponsors of all kinds want to be right there in the moment with them.
A gold rush on the grid and the pitch
The scale of spending has been remarkable. Crypto.com signed a deal worth over 100 million US dollars to become Formula 1’s central crypto partner, while OKX put its name on Manchester City’s shirts in a reported 70 million dollar agreement. Bybit’s partnership with Red Bull Racing was reported at around 150 million dollars over three years. Across F1, almost every team on the grid has carried a crypto logo at some point, and many of the world’s top football clubs have followed suit. Kraken sponsors Tottenham and Atletico Madrid, Coinbase backs Aston Martin, and exchanges from Binance to Bitget have tied themselves to leagues and clubs across Europe. What began as a scattering of logos has grown into a full-blown category of its own.
Some of the biggest crypto sponsorship deals in F1 and football, reported value in US$ million.
Why crypto is racing in
So what is driving all of this money? The appeal comes down to a handful of powerful reasons:
Put together, these factors make elite sport almost irresistible for a brand that wants to reach millions of new users quickly and look established while doing it.
Example In 2025, Aston Martin’s Formula 1 team announced a multi-year partnership with Coinbase that is paid entirely in USDC, a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. It was presented as the first F1 sponsorship settled fully in crypto, a sign of how deeply the two worlds are now intertwined. Since 2023, the money has also shifted from one-off celebrity endorsements toward longer, more stable club and league partnerships.
The risk behind the hype
For all the momentum, crypto sponsorship carries real danger. Deals are often signed at the very peak of a market cycle, and a sudden downturn or scandal can turn a proud logo into an embarrassment overnight. The industry has already learned this the hard way, and the survivors now keep a more careful, compliance-focused profile than the free-spending names of a few years ago. The lesson, as one analyst put it, is that sports marketing does not create a company’s reputation; it simply broadcasts it. A strong, compliant brand gets amplified, but so does a shaky one.
Important The gold rush has a cautionary side. When the exchange FTX collapsed in 2022, its sponsorships became a liability almost instantly: Mercedes stripped the branding from its F1 cars mid-season, and an NBA arena was renamed. As the industry now puts it, sports sponsorship amplifies whatever a brand already is, for better or for worse.
The takeaway
Crypto exchanges are racing to sponsor football clubs and F1 teams because sport offers exactly what they crave: enormous global reach, a young and tech-savvy audience, and instant credibility. The strategy can pay off spectacularly, but as recent history shows, it can also backfire just as fast. The winners will be the exchanges that treat sponsorship as a long-term relationship, not a quick marketing splash. For now the logos keep appearing on cars and jerseys, proof that the marriage of crypto and sport is far from over.
