Fantasy Football League to Raise $100 Million in Crypto ICO

A blockchain startup wants to raise nearly $100 million dollars to create a new form of fantasy football.

Called the Crown League, the project's owner told CoinDesk on Tuesday that it seeks to form a professional fantasy football league, with 12 teams initially, which will collectively be owned by fans via the platform's crypto tokens.

In some respects, the league will act like other fantasy leagues, but it differs in being a single, unified entity operated by professional managers and owned by the general public.

Dan Nissanoff, chief executive of CrownThrown Inc. - the company behind the Crown League - told CoinDesk that fantasy football at present is "Incredibly fragmented." "Nobody cares about other teams," he said.

The Crown League seeks to unite fantasy fans by giving them shared ownership of a single team on a blockchain, ensuring that "For the first time you can feel like an owner."

"We are going to give you access to, as a fantasy enthusiast, and there are tens of millions of them in the United States alone; we are going to give you access to the people playing at the highest level. You can follow the experts," Nissanoff told CoinDesk.

"We're going to bring the league to life with events at the national level [such as] the draft. We're going to bring together groups that share the same financial and emotional interest ... At the local level we're going to have events branded by the teams."

The firm has also announced a token pre-sale, which is expected to raise $30 million over 60-90 days.

The pre-sale will be followed by 12 "Micro-ICOs" of $5 million apiece, with each representing a different team and open to the general public through a regulation A+ exemption, meaning it will need to be approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The first proper season should launch in the autumn of 2019 at the start of the National Football League season.