Alexandre Dreyfus (@alex_dreyfus): It's Just One Month of Football

It's Just One Month of Football The crypto market has been brutal these last few days. ZEC, MicroStrategy trimming BTC, macro noise in every direction. CHZ has felt it like everyone else — a token that clawed its way back into the top 100 earlier this year is sitting on the edge again. Plenty of new tokens have arrived since, the field is more crowded, but the tape is the tape. Let me say the thing founders aren't supposed to say out loud: it hurts. When the token goes down, we lose money too — the company, the management, all of us. This isn't my first cycle. But this one feels especially painful. And yet — it's not personal. Look at $OFC. Look at $FUN. Look at the rest of our vertical. The whole sector is bleeding at the same time. This is macro and sector beta, not a verdict on any single project's work. The market is tough on you the same way it's tough on us. That's a free market. Here's what I keep reminding our team. People assume patterns repeat. World Cup is coming, so the "Chiliz trade" must be obvious, right? Markets don't work like that. The obvious trade is the one everyone front-runs and then fades — people counter-trade the consensus, and they should. A World Cup is an event that some people trade. For us, it's just one month of football. It's our third World Cup as a project, our second since CHZ has traded — and if cycles simply repeated themselves, this would all be too easy. They don't. That's the whole point. So our job a few days before the World Cup is exactly the same as it'll be the day after the final whistle: build. And we have been building — loudly, if you've been paying attention. Over the last few months we started delivering Chiliz 2030. Yes, we have a long-term vision: Omnichain is live — starting with CHZ and PEPPER, and now Fan Tokens too (PSG, Arsenal), with national teams next. By this summer, every Fan Token will be tradeable across major venues on multiple chains. We gave tokens decimals, unlocking real DeFi — omnichain and on Chiliz Chain with Kayen, who'll be rolling out more SportFi/DeFi initiatives soon. We launched national teams, with more in the pipeline (waiting on contracts to be signed… or not). Our biggest win: the joint SEC/CFTC guidance naming Socios.com and Fan Tokens — clearing our path to launch in the US after the World Cup. We're MiCA-regulated ahead of the official July 1, 2026 framework, and we sit on regulatory committees from the UK's FCA to Brazil. College Sports first — we expect to announce teams and universities soon to kick off the US. Months and months of work, before we ever touch NBA or NFL. SBI Chiliz, our JV with a multi-billion-dollar Japanese conglomerate, signed its first team (Tokyo Verdy), and we just got the green light to list our first Fan Token in Japan after five years. SportFi is pulling serious appetite — we're in conversations with major global tokenization and securities players who want to build new sports-finance products with us. And this summer we're revamping Socios.com to start teasing where we're heading. And it's not just what we ship — it's how. We've restructured the company to put AI-driven initiatives at the core, so we build faster. We even ran an internal hackathon, teams vibe-coding new apps end to end — and one of them, SquadMeUp, launches in a few days, right ahead of the World Cup, built to interact with Fan Tokens. That's the energy inside the building right now, and it's genuinely exciting. None of this depends on a one-month tournament. All of it compounds long after it's over. When the chart is red, it's easy to confuse price with progress. They are not the same thing. Price is what the market is willing to pay today. Progress is the work that decides what the market pays in three years. This week, at our HQ in Malta, the whole team was in the room. And despite the tape, we walked out hyped — because we honestly believe we have the best use case and the best story in sports and crypto. Not a story we're telling. A story we're shipping. One last thing, because it needs saying. When the market hurts, emotions are hard to contain — I understand that. I hear you. We feel you. It's just one month of football. We're building for the decade. Alex - (Spelling and Grammar improved by Claude)