Nobody in a boardroom
signed any of this.
A blockchain community argued in public about whether to spend its own treasury on sport. It voted yes on a racing car. It voted yes on a football club, twice. And when a fan rewards app came to referendum it said no, more than once, and that product got built anyway. Every proposal is still readable by anyone. This is what actually happened, including the parts that did not go to plan.
An Indy 500 entry, chosen by vote
A driver asked a community to back him directly instead of asking a brand. The community said yes, and became the first to back an athlete by on-chain vote rather than behind closed doors.
The proposal was not a logo placement. It funded a multi-series programme: the Indianapolis 500, a NASCAR Truck race and a Nitro Rallycross entry, with the driver serving as brand ambassador for the year. When the Nitrocross season folded before that race could happen, the programme delivered additional NASCAR starts instead, an Xfinity entry at Indianapolis among them. Anyone could read the terms, argue the price, and vote.
Source: ecosystem press and race coverage, May 2024.
The car did not merely turn up. Conor Daly led 22 laps and gained 19 positions on his way to that top ten, taking the biggest mover award of the race, which is a rare thing for a sponsorship to be able to say.
A training kit worn worldwide
The same mechanism, at a far bigger scale: Polkadot became Inter Miami CF's Official Global Training Partner, with the mark front and centre on every first-team training top and signage throughout Chase Stadium.
Training kit is the quiet win in football sponsorship. Match shirts are seen on matchdays. Training tops are worn at every session, on every road trip, and through every pre-match warmup, in front of the cameras that follow the most photographed squad in the sport.
Source: Relo Metrics, Nielsen Sports, Endeavor Analytics, Meltwater — Aug 2024–Dec 2025. Full media value is gross; sponsor media value is net.
Then the kit went to the biggest stage in club football. When Inter Miami reached the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup, becoming the first US team to win a match in the competition, the Polkadot training top travelled with them.
Source: Inter Miami CF 2025 partnership recap.
The kit itself
Hospitality at Chase Stadium
The partnership came with a presence at the club's home. Polkadot hosted partners, builders and guests in the stadium suites through the season, putting the ecosystem in the room with the people who run the club.
The one the community turned down
Not every proposal passes. The fan rewards platform went to referendum more than once and was voted down each time. It got built anyway, through the partnership rather than the treasury.
Hosted here so it stays up regardless of any platform. Also on YouTube.
IMCF Rewards is a global fan engagement platform for Inter Miami CF supporters, a Polkadot partnership with SmartMedia Technologies. Sweepstakes, instant wins, mystery boxes, augmented reality moments and challenges tied to stadium activity, with prizes running from signed shirts to suite experiences.
It is worth being honest about the mechanism here rather than pretending governance is a magic wand. Token holders looked at this one and said no. The people who believed in it found another route, and the product shipped. Both of those things are true, and the second does not cancel the first.
The part that outlasts a season
The partnerships opened doors that mattered more than the visibility. The racing driver the community elected ended up judging a developer hackathon at Harvard, and the network reached two universities and a sports business school.
Harvard
At the EasyA x Polkadot hackathon, more than 300 developers built 55 games in a weekend using NFTs on a Polkadot parachain. Conor Daly attended as a guest and judge, which is an unusual sentence to write about an IndyCar driver, and precisely the point: the partnership was never only about a logo on a car.
Consensus 2024
Three weeks after the Indy 500, Conor Daly showed up at CoinDesk Consensus in Austin — one of the largest crypto conferences in the world — as a Polkadot brand ambassador. He signed autographs, played games with attendees at the Polkadot booth, and brought the racecar onto the conference floor. Fifteen thousand people attended. Conor was one of the only professional athletes in the room, and he sat down on top of the #24 car for a closing-night interview with Polkadot's The Kusamarian.
If the embed does not load, watch it on YouTube.
Vbrick and Verified Authentic
The paddock opened a door nobody predicted. Paul Sparta, CEO of Vbrick — the leading enterprise video platform, whose clients include the likes of NASA, Boeing and Morgan Stanley — knew Conor personally. That relationship led him to the Polkadot ecosystem. In March 2025 Vbrick announced Verified Authentic: a blockchain-powered media authentication framework built on Polkadot with BlockDeep Labs, designed to verify content ownership and fight disinformation at enterprise scale. An enterprise video company serving NASA chose Polkadot because of a racing driver. The referenda made that possible.
Sparta and his CTO took the story to Polkadot's own Space Monkeys podcast, from The Kusamarian, to explain how it works:
If the embed does not load, watch it on YouTube.
The Indy 500 qualifying report for Ref 1111 noted the Vbrick MVP was already underway before the end of 2024, with plans to demo digital rights management on Polkadot for AWS at an Indianapolis conference. No boardroom planned that either.
University of Miami
Polkadot was presenting partner of the Business of Blockchain Technology Conference at Miami Herbert Business School, two days of researchers, entrepreneurs, professionals and policymakers, with students from blockchain clubs across the university attending alongside them. Keynotes included Tether co-founder William Quigley. Visa supported the programme too, which tells you the room was not a crypto echo chamber.
Global Institute of Sport
Separately, at the Global Institute of Sport's Miami campus inside Inter Miami CF, the partnership became teaching material. A guest lecture on the future of fan engagement used the rewards platform as its case study, for students of the business of sport.
A logo on a shirt buys attention for a season. Funding the rooms where the next generation of builders meets the people already doing the work compounds for far longer, and it is much closer to what this network is actually for.
Read the primary sources
The referenda are permanent and public, and every announcement was carried by the series, the club, or the trade press. The primary sources are below.