Athletes drafted on Thursday to compete in the MoonPay X Games League are set to receive signing bonuses in stablecoins, providing an early look at how the crypto payments provider plans to elevate its partners via the action sports spectacle.
MoonPay said one-time payments of $2,500 will be sent to 40 athletes in the form of XO Cash, a stablecoin offered by crypto wallet provider Exodus. What’s more, the athletes will receive the funds in Exodus’ flagship product, with balances linked to payment cards.
In December, MoonPay said that it would work with Exodus to develop a stablecoin that dovetails with Exodus Pay, a self-custodial payments platform that’s supposed to launch in the second half of this year. That wasn’t long before MoonPay entered into a three-year title partnership with X Games, part of the organization’s shift towards a league-based format.
In an interview with Decrypt, Exodus co-founder and CEO JP Richardson described the arrangement as especially beneficial for international competitors, who’d struggle to spend the signing bonuses abroad using traditional payments services like Venmo.
“We’re actually empowering athletes to get paid, and then [enabling] them to use the money anywhere they want in the world through Visa and Mastercard,” he added.
When MoonPay signaled in January that the X Games were shifting to a league-based format, the firm noted that athletes didn’t receive compensation for participating in past standalone events. With prize money dictating who walked away empty-handed, the company said salaries could reduce athletes’ exposure to costs associated with training, travel, and health care.
At the time, MoonPay President Keith Grossman told Decrypt that its title partnership would also function as a distribution mechanism for crypto-native projects, allowing them gain media exposure through opportunities that they may not be able to access otherwise.
“We have 35 million consumers that ultimately align with the same demographic as the X Games,” he said. “We have so many areas that we can ultimately bring our partners into.”
Richardson acknowledged that transactions involving stablecoins are often visible to the public, potentially placing athletes in a situation where their funds can be tracked. However, he noted that Exodus has paid its employees in Bitcoin for years, making compensation transparent.
“I understand that by building payment products that I can’t just adapt this transparent view to everybody in the world,” he said. “I think there’s some really interesting things that are happening with stablecoins to solve those problems, and I see the value in it.”
