ManCity puts sponsorship deal on hold
The Premier League club Manchester City signed a cooperation agreement with the crypto startup 3Key on November 12th and called it new official regional partner for the “decentralized financial trading analysis” presented. In informed circles, doubts about the seriousness of the company quickly arose
At the beginning of this week, the journalist Martin Calladine asked on Twitter to digitally track down the marketing director Ryan S. Hodder mentioned in ManCity’s press release. However, the Twitter crush did not succeed in discovering its digital footprint. All that was to be found was a photo of a man with a red beard in a plaid suit, who could possibly be 3Key’s “Chief Growth Strategist” Jacob Caine.
This was astonishing, as Hodder was quoted by ManCity as saying that “Practice, teamwork and passion are the foundations of success, and these values are in abundance at Manchester City.” A successful crypto company and its executives shouldn’t have to do something be better known? Many asked themselves that.
After the first doubts, further peculiarities quickly emerged. So 3Key should be a new “regional partner”. For which region was just as unclear as the location of the company. That reports the Guardian.
Equally dubious: One day after the Twitter community began investigations, two websites connected to 3Key went offline. A day later, one of the websites went back online. There you can read that 3Key has been in operation since 2020. However, neither employees nor available products are mentioned.
According to its own information, 3Key intends to facilitate trading in digital assets. In addition, it allegedly has the so-called CeDeFi concept (Centralized Decentralized Finance) up its sleeve, a combination of “the best of both”, centralized and decentralized finance, “to make participation easy for everyone”.
The open question marks have not left the club management unimpressed. After sponsorship manager Stephen Cieplik initially expressed his joy about the 3Key partnership and announced that he wanted to develop ManCity-related crypto content with 3Key, the association has since withdrawn.
As the Times has learned, ManCity now wants to carry out further research itself. There will be no joint actions until they are completed. The association had also confirmed this to the Daily Mail, whose editor Jack Gaughan had published the statement on Twitter.
According to Forbes Manchester City is the fourth largest football club in the world, with an estimated market value of $ 4 billion. 3Key isn’t the club’s first crypto experience. ManCity had already chosen the blockchain platform Socios.com in March to use it to launch a fan token.
