When your NBA team is in 13th place out of 15 teams in the Western Conference and in the bottom third of the entire league in attendance, you have to build buzz some way. For the Sacramento Kings and its new majority owner, Vivek Ranadivé, the solution appears to be bitcoin.
Sacramento Kings to Accept Bitcoin for Apparel and Ticket Purchases
Overstock.com and Zynga have also started accepting the digital currency.
123dartist/Shutterstock
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
The Kings announced today that fans will be able to use bitcoin starting March 1 to buy tickets and apparel in the Kings online store. The team is using bitcoin payment processor BitPay to accept the digital currency.
“We are maniacally focused on creating the most seamless experience for our fans in all facets,” Ranadivé said in a prepared statement. “With BitPay, we are able to implement a technology that allows our fans to make Kings-related purchases without physically reaching into their wallets.”
The new Kings owner, who is CEO of publicly traded enterprise software firm Tibco Software, has talked publicly about wanting to bring technology-forward thinking to his team, as part of a movement he dubs NBA 3.0.
“A major tenet of the NBA 3.0 philosophy is about utilizing technology for the betterment of the fan experience, and this is yet another step in that process,” he added in the statement.
The news follows similar recent announcements from online retailer Overstock.com and gaming company Zynga.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
