Four years ago, the personal blog of a University of Pennsylvania computer science professor was called Crypto.com.
A little-known company took over the web address and turned it into a playground for cryptocurrencies, and by the end of the year, the name will be on one of the most storied U.S. sports venues.
Monaco is a start-up that was founded in 2016 and offers a variety of services. It has addresses in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Malta. The chief executive ran a failed daily deals site in Southeast Asia. The company has no institutional funding.
This week, the company said it had secured the naming rights for 20 years to the Los Angeles arena. The venue will be renamed on December 25. Two people with knowledge of the deal said it was one of the largest ever paid for a sporting venue's naming rights.
Over the past year, the world of cryptocurrencies has been on a tear, minting millionaires, spawning a slew of new buzzwords, and attracting investment from more than 20 million people in the United States alone. A group of fans of cryptocurrencies bid more than 40 million dollars for a rare original copy of the U.S. Constitution.
The price of cryptocurrencies has doubled in the last year, and companies like Crypto.com are competing for attention.
Laura Shin, an author who has run ads on the website, said that it is a symbol of how mainstream cryptocurrencies have become. A lot of what the people call "normies" have entered the space over the past year.
Ms. Shin was not surprised by the naming rights deal. She said that the story of every person who started with a small amount of money is the same.
The company used to offer branded Visa debit cards that could be topped up with cryptocurrencies. It raised funding by minting its own digital token and selling it to the public in an initial coin offering, which is similar to an initial public offering. Kris Marszalek, the company's chief executive, said in a previous interview that the company's balance sheet was $200 million.
Mr. Marszalek decided to change the name of Monaco. The University of Pennsylvania professor had owned the domain name for 25 years. Mr. Blaze had publicly disdained the new digital gold rush and refused to part with the web address.
Mr. Blaze was able to resist this time. He wrote in July of last year that he had gotten a growing amount of offers, many of which were obviously non serious, but a few of which were attention-getting. He said he had taken most of them off, but it became clear that holding on to the domain was not in his best interests.
Mr. Blaze was a professor at Georgetown University. Mr. Marszalek refused to discuss the price he paid for the address, but pointed to an article on the tech site The Verge that suggested the address could be worth millions.
Mr. Marszalek said that the headquarters of Foris Technology and its subsidiary, the website, were in Singapore. People can buy and sell digital currency using the trading app, but they have to pay a fee. Mr. Marszalek did not provide exact figures for the company.
The market has been great this year. He said that between April and June, the revenue of Crypto.com was about a quarter of that of Coinbase, which generated over $2 billion in revenue.
The ninth-largest exchange by daily volume is Crypto.com. The company has been able to fund a marketing push because of the bull market.
The United Fighting Championship, Formula 1 Racing, Italy's Serie A soccer league, and sports teams including the Paris St.-Germain soccer team in France and the Philadelphia 76ers are just some of the sports teams it has signed sponsorship deals with. The advertisement on the website of the company tells customers that fortune favors the brave.
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The deal will cost the company about $700 million and will change the venue to the Crypto.com Arena.
Mr. Marszalek said that he loved Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and that those moves gave him additional visibility. He said that the deal is even more significant because of the legacy of the place. It is culturally relevant.
The company's naming rights deal will last for 20 years, but it's not clear if the company will stay in power. The home arena of the Miami Heat was bought by FTX, in a bet that cryptocurrencies are now mainstream.
Stadium naming deals have gone bad in the past. The Houston Astros stadium was named after the energy company, but it collapsed two years later. CMGI, a dot-com incubator, got the naming rights to the new football stadium in Foxboro, Mass., in 2000, but fell from grace in the dot-com crash.
The name of the office supply store chain has been changed in Los Angeles. The venue was named after it in 1997 by the company controlled by Philip F. Anschutz. It sold the naming rights to the Staples Center back to the company in 2019.
Dan Beckerman said he didn't think the site would go the way of the store.
He said that they believe it to be viable, long term, and that they will be around a lot longer than all of us.
