In brief
- The San Antonio Spurs, a professional basketball team, has struck a sponsorship deal with Ledger.
- The Spurs’s new jerseys feature a Ledger-branded patch.
- Crypto sports sponsorships are seeing a major resurgence in 2025.
NBA basketball team the San Antonio Spurs has signed a sponsorship deal with Ledger, according to a Tuesday statement from the hardware wallet manufacturer—the latest sign that crypto sports partnerships are experiencing a resurgence.
Under the multi-year agreement, the Spurs will wear jerseys emblazoned with Ledger-branded patches. The Paris-based firm also plans to take an “active role” in boosting the Spurs’ community engagement efforts in France, it said in a statement.
The deal forms part of Ledger’s efforts to expand its reach in both the U.S. and its home market, Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier said Tuesday in the statement.
“The U.S. is Ledger’s top market globally, and aligning ourselves with an historic U.S. sports team, which boasts a deep French connection past and present, will help us onboard the next generation of sovereign individuals,” Gauthier said.
Although the Spurs is a U.S. basketball team, its star center Victor “Wemby” Wembanyama is from France.
Crypto sports partnerships
Ledger’s Spurs sponsorship comes amid a revival in partnerships between professional athletics teams and major crypto firms over the past year.
Crypto companies’ spending on sports sponsorships recently increased 20% to $565 million for the 2024/25 season on a year-over-year basis, with football-related initiatives accounting for more than half of new sponsorship deals, according to a recent report from sports marketing firm SportQuake.
Among those deals was Tether’s purchase of a stake in Italian soccer team Juventus and trading platform Gate’s sponsorship of Formula One team Red Bull Racing.
Uniform branding deals—like Ledger’s partnership with the Spurs—are a popular way for digital assets companies to sponsor athletics teams, accounting for 37% of all crypto sports partnerships, SportQuake data shows.
The recent increase in sports sponsorships marks a stunning reversal from late 2022, when Web3 firms pulled back on, or cancelled, their partnerships due to difficult crypto market conditions precipitated by FTX’s collapse.
During that time, FTX’s partnerships with the MLB, Formula One and the NBA crumbled.
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