The Sunshine Tour, a South African golf competition, will offer part of its prizes in Bitcoin (BTC). The move is made possible by an agreement with Luno, a cryptocurrency exchange platform.
Bitcoin to be won in golf competition
South Africa’s premier golf competition will feature Bitcoin (BTC) prizes as part of a deal with cryptocurrency exchange platform Luno
We are excited to announce our sponsorship with @Sunshine_Tour, introducing the Luno Order of Merit leaderboard. The top 3 golf professionals will receive prizes in Bitcoin A first in South African sports!
ZAR 500k
ZAR 200k
ZAR 100kLearn more: https://t.co/pTXbXZbpcG
– Luno (@LunoGlobal) May 6, 2022
The Sunshine Tour is effectively the premier tour in Southern Africa for professional golf. Through this new agreement, the ranking, named the Order of Merit, will allow the top competitors to receive Bitcoin in their Luno account.
The prizes are as follows for first to third place at the end of the season:
- R500,000 (approximately $31,000);
- R200,000 (approx. $12,000);
- R100,000 (about US$6,000).
Luno is a brand that fits with our strong digital focus and the new, younger audience we are reaching, and we are delighted to welcome them to the Sunshine Tour.
Luno is a centralised exchange with a presence in countries such as South Africa, the UK and Australia and has 10 million users worldwide.
The platform made headlines last year when it ran an ad campaign on the London Underground that read “If you see Bitcoin on the Tube, it’s time to buy”
A growing presence in the sports world
Golf is not the first sport to implement Bitcoin prizes, we have already seen it recently in MMA with Crypto.com. In fact, it is becoming difficult to list all the announcements bringing together sports and cryptocurrencies, as they are becoming so frequent.
To illustrate this trend, we can cite FIFA, which announced last week that Algorand (ALGO) was becoming its official blockchain and would be one of the sponsors of the 2022 football world cup. In the same sport, Lionel Messi became the ambassador of Socios.com at the end of March.
In basketball, the Pau club has put part of its capital on sale in the form of a security token and the NBA has launched its collection of non-fungible tokens (NFT). Through these few examples, we can see that golf has been added to the list of sports joining the blockchain universe, logically following a basic trend, which seems well set to last.
