1. Introduction
[1.1] In December 2021, an iconic structure in downtown Los Angeles—the Staples Center—made national headlines when it was announced that it would be receiving a new name. The multi-purpose event venue is home to multiple Los Angeles–based professional sports teams, including the Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA) (note 1), the Sparks of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA), and the Kings of the National Hockey League (NHL). Office supply retail chain Staples, Inc. had initially signed the standard twenty-year deal for the venue's naming rights when it was built in 1999, which had been extended in 2009 in an unprecedented lifetime naming rights deal (Vincent 2009). It thus came as something of a surprise to fans when the venue's owner, Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), bought the naming rights back from Staples and sold them to Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com for $700 million in a new twenty-year agreement. The Staples Center thus began its new life as the Crypto.com Arena on December 25, 2021.
[1.2] On Reddit, cryptocurrency users celebrated the deal, viewing it as a sign that a new era was on the horizon, that cryptocurrency would soon reach mass adoption and that the value of Crypto.com's exchange token, Cronos, would soon skyrocket, as the community says, "to the moon." Elsewhere on the site, reactions were mixed at best. Some responses expressed ambivalence about a building's name changing from one corporation to another or complained more broadly about the proliferation of corporate-branded stadiums; others derided the new arena name as one of the worst in sporting history. For Reddit's Lakers fans, the deal seemed emblematic of the team's disappointing 2021–2022 season. As one fan put it on the r/lakers subreddit, "Out of all the Ls we've taken so far, this is the biggest one" (u/AlexGarseea, November 16, 2021).
[1.3] Many reactions, both positive and negative, saw the name as representing something greater than itself, a shift within the broader flows of culture and capital. Perhaps it heralded the demise of a once-iconic sports brand at the hands of an unlikable technophilic industry—or perhaps it was the perfect symbol of technological progress, of the economic spotlight shifting from physical office supplies to data and information. Given these divergent narratives, the Crypto.com naming deal acts as a case study in how a stadium serves as a contested site for the formation and negotiation of identity within a neoliberal world defined by digital technologies and brand names. I consider what a new stadium name—particularly one as controversial as Crypto.com Arena—means for those invested in it. Importantly, the deal came not long after the untimely death of former star Laker Kobe Bryant (who had played with the team from 1996 to 2016) and his daughter Gianna in January 2020, and so it took on a level of profundity beyond the name change itself within the Lakers community and basketball fandom in general.
[1.4] I examine the conflicting and overlapping conversations that unfolded on several Reddit forums reacting to the name change. I show how, for these users, the stadium's name became a focus for expressions of hope or anxiety, a kind of spatiotemporal articulation of fan identity. For the Lakers community on Reddit, the deal was an opportunity for nostalgic looking back, memorializing the iconic era during which the team won three consecutive championships from 2000 to 2002, linking the end of the Staples Center with Bryant's career and tragic death. On the other hand, for the site's cryptocurrency enthusiasts, it served largely as a reason to look forward, a symbol of a bright financial and technological future just around the corner. In both cases, it was clear that the name change represented the end of an era and the start of a new one.
[1.5] As noted, the Staples Center is home to more teams than just the Lakers, but I focus my study on the Lakers Reddit community for several reasons. Between the Lakers, Sparks, and Kings, the Lakers easily have the largest subreddit, offering the most plentiful dataset for collecting reactions from interested users online. The Lakers also have arguably the biggest cultural impact within and beyond sports fan communities, which meant that discussions of the stadium across all subreddits and broader news and social media framed it as mostly a Lakers matter. Importantly, the Staples Center/Crypto.com Arena had become particularly associated with Bryant's iconicity: following his death, fans, celebrities, and news outlets referred to the stadium as "the house that Kobe built," though that nickname had already been in use before he died (Rogers 2020). This is certainly not to suggest that the other teams do not have their own sense of fan identification with the stadium or that they are not worthy of attention simply for having less recognizable brands—only that for the purposes of this study, my focus is limited to the Lakers community and their relationships with cryptocurrency proponents and the wider basketball community on Reddit.
[1.6] I looked at 114 Reddit posts and their comments across four subreddits devoted to the NBA (r/nba, around 7.4 million members at the time of research in 2023), the Lakers (r/lakers, around 486,000 members), cryptocurrency (r/CryptoCurrency, around 6.4 million members), and Crypto.com (r/Crypto_com, around 186,000 members) in order to gather reactions to the name change from basketball and cryptocurrency fans generally and fans of Crypto.com and the Lakers specifically. These posts all came between the announcement of the naming deal on November 16, 2021 and the official date of the name change, December 25 of that year. I also include some references to posts on other social media platforms that were shared on Reddit and became part of the general discussion among these particular online communities. The number of comments on the Reddit posts varied drastically, from as low as 3 and up to over 3,400. I collected more posts from the two cryptocurrency subreddits than from the basketball subreddits—38 each from r/CryptoCurrency and r/Crypto_com, 16 from r/nba, and 22 from r/lakers. However, the posts on the basketball subreddits had more comments: a median of 170 comments for r/nba, 69.5 for r/lakers, 38.5 for r/CryptoCurrency, and 30 for r/Crypto_com.
[1.7] As Nicholas Proferes et al. (2021) note, Reddit is becoming an increasingly popular focus of study for digital media scholars. While it is not as widely used as, say, Facebook or Twitter, I chose it as a focus for study because its organizing mechanisms make it an easy place for internet users to engage in discussions on a given interest, such as basketball or finance, without necessarily wanting or being able to seek out in-person events or more exclusive online spaces. Reddit has no mechanism for users to "friend" or "follow" other users, so its social network is structured around shared interests rather than between linked individuals. According to Reddit's own reporting in 2021, the majority (57 percent) of its users were male-identified and between the ages of 18 and 34 (58 percent; Proferes et al. 2021). Given that finance and sports are both typically coded as masculine interests, we might make assumptions along similar lines about the gender identity of the users on the specific subreddits under investigation here, though because that data is not available and users operate pseudonymously, I cannot make any definite statements. I won't suggest either that these online forums are representative of the entire cryptocurrency or Lakers communities—or even of the character of these communities online.
[1.8] I argue, rather, that the stadium and its name(s) played an important role in a specific articulation of online fandom, an attempt by users to orient themselves and their fan identities within the seemingly unstoppable sea of changes in technology and finance. Though they offer divergent interpretations of the new name, as I show, both communities' reactions to it display a somewhat tense relationship to the branded stadium that requires regular renegotiation and redefinition, as is characteristic of identity within the ebbs and flows of capital. I offer an overview of literature on the stadium space as an important component of fan identity, including scholarship on the fraught relationship many fans feel to corporate-branded stadium names. I then provide a brief overview of cryptocurrency and Crypto.com's branding push within the sports world to provide context on the naming rights deal before giving an analysis of the reactions from cryptocurrency and basketball forums on Reddit. I conclude by considering what these contrasting narratives suggest about the role of the stadium within community identification after the name change became official.
2. Stadiums, names, fans
[2.1] In sociological and cultural studies of sporting venues, scholars have noted these spaces' importance in shaping a sense of identity and belonging among both sports fans and the wider communities in which they sit. Yi-Fu Tuan's (1990) theory of topophilia—that is, the "affective bond between people and place or setting" (4)—is particularly relevant in understanding the connection between the sports fan and their team's home stadium. Chris Gaffney and John Bale (2004) argue that sporting venues foster a topophilic connection to both place and time in fans, linking them to a long-lasting cultural identity: "the sense of belonging to processes which extend both forward and backward in time are contained within the stadium and help to foster the sense of shared purpose, historical processes, and cultural belonging" (35). Kiernan Gordon's (2013) study of professional park design likewise engages topophilia, noting a trend over time from affective, locally contextual design toward an emphasis on "mass spectacle, in which virtually every inch of playing and spectating space was rationalized to ensure maximum financial efficiency and performance heterogeneity" (229). In other words, the stadium's original topophilic quality, which had traditionally drawn affective investment from fans, is steadily being replaced by what Edward Relph (1976) terms placelessness, a sense of inauthenticity within a neoliberal cityscape defined by uniformity, standardization, perpetual redevelopment, and commercialism. Similarly, Steven Secular (2023) analyzes how the proliferation of new stadiums beginning in the 1990s was accompanied by a growing association between Silicon Valley and the NBA, both through investments in teams forming venture capitalists and the increasing technological advancement of the stadiums themselves. As arenas come to resemble multimedia platforms with numerous modes of participation and consumption, the in-person spectator is turned into a media user situated in a marketized network of "users, advertisers, partners, and policymakers alike" (78).
[2.2] Since the 1990s, locally specific names for sporting venues have increasingly given way to corporate branding, with several scholars (Boyd 2000; Reysen et al. 2012; Woisetschläger et al. 2014; Medway et al. 2019) observing frequent frustration from sports fans with the perceived inauthenticity of corporate sponsorship. Taking a somewhat nostalgic view in line with Gordon's trajectory of baseball parks, Josh Boyd (2000) identifies a shift in sporting venues from names that hold a commemorative, cultural significance for the local community and toward the "uncertainty and only temporary commitment" (335) of the corporate lease, which "abbreviates that narrative that connects team, space, and community" (400). The fan's sense of belonging in the community, in effect, becomes compromised at the very place where it is meant to feel the strongest: the home stadium.
[2.3] I offer this analysis of the Staples Center/Crypto.com Arena as a valuable contribution to this area of research for a number of reasons. First, this case forces us to dispense with any kind of romantic nostalgia for a bygone era of an "authentic" stadium name, as seen in Boyd's commemorative/corporate dichotomy: both the venue's old and new names belong to massive corporations. This situates fans in the state of uneasy ambivalence that Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) identifies as "brand cultures," or the "cultural contexts for everyday living, individual identity, and affective relationships that emerge out of the intersecting relationship between marketing, a product, and consumers" (3), creating a complicated relationship between the consumer-subject and their sense of the authentic. Within this landscape, we are each left to consider what sort of identity formation is possible, what is empowering or disempowering, what is important, valuable, trivial, and shallow.
[2.4] Second, the particular company that bought the naming rights, Crypto.com, has its own following in the form of Cronos holders and cryptocurrency proponents in general, meaning that the name change was seen as an important moment even outside the fandoms of the teams that the stadium houses. Whether or not Cronos holders or the cryptocurrency community should be considered a fandom akin to a media or sports fandom, as Paul Ford (2021) argues, is beyond the scope of this present research; but whatever the proper label, it is a group of people who construct at least part of their online identity around owning and talking about cryptocurrency.
[2.5] Finally, following the meltdown of fellow cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which had previously paid for naming rights to the home arena for the Miami Heat, major doubts have emerged from both basketball and cryptocurrency spaces online as to whether Crypto.com will be able to hold onto its own arena name for the next twenty years. Considering all of these factors together, we can understand the branded stadium not only as one of Banet-Weiser's brand cultures, but also as a site of the constant speculation that defines the cryptocurrency sphere and finance capitalism as a whole. What had seemed, at least for a little while, like a fundamental part of Lakers culture—Staples, Inc.—was revealed to be ephemeral. Is anything permanent in these conditions?
3. Cryptocurrency and Crypto.com's play for the sporting world
[3.1] As I previously noted, it is significant that the naming rights to the Staples Center were bought not by another retail chain or a brick-and-mortar bank but by a cryptocurrency company. As an industry that insists on its own importance as the vanguard of a technological revolution, it is relevant for us to consider the context in which this messaging took shape in order to understand public responses to it. Cryptocurrency's development and entrance into mainstream discourse is complex and riddled with obscurantist jargon, making brief and simple summaries quite difficult. Ingolf G. A. Pernice and Brett Scott's (2021) elegant definition is useful: "A cryptocurrency system can be understood as a system intended for the issuance of tokens which are intended to be used as a general or limited-purpose medium-of-exchange, and which are accounted for using an often collectively-maintained digital ledger making use of cryptography to replace trust in institutions to varying extents." The concept of cryptocurrency emerged in 2008 with Bitcoin and has since proliferated with a number of other cryptocurrencies and exchange platforms. The system ostensibly offers a modality for conducting transactions divorced from centralized banking systems, and currently some businesses do accept cryptocurrency as a method of payment as valid as cash, credit, and mobile wallets; however, in its current form, it exists mainly as an unregulated market for speculative decentralized finance, or DeFi, as it is popularly called, often conducted through the making and trading of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Criticisms of cryptocurrency's system, culture, and core values abound: of the intense environmental impact of the blockchain technology on which cryptocurrency exists, particularly in the case of Bitcoin (Salam 2023); of its propensity for pyramid schemes and pump-and-dump scams (Mims 2022); of the industry's concentration of power in the hands of a few technocrats despite its rhetoric of decentralization and democratization (Roberts 2022); of the general unlikability of the "crypto bro" as a technocentric manifestation of toxic masculinity (Cassino 2023).
[3.2] Crypto.com (originally named Monaco but renamed in 2018) is a cryptocurrency exchange platform founded in 2016 by Bobby Bao, Gary Or, Kris Marszalek, and Rafael Melo. With it, users may buy and sell exchange tokens including but not limited to Crypto.com's token, Cronos (symbolized as CRO). The company's messaging positions it as a gateway to a bright technological future defined by a decentralized internet (known as Web3). While since removed after my original research in 2023, its mission statement on its website said, "it's an audacious goal. For years we've been told it's impossible. Undeterred, we embrace the moment and commit." The statement concluded with a call for the reader to push past their reservations, ending on the company's slogan: "And when in doubt, calm your mind and steel your nerves with four simple words whispered by the intrepid since the time of the Romans. Fortune Favors the Brave" (Crypto.com, https://crypto.com/us/fftb).
[3.3] The image of the risk-taking maverick has anchored Crypto.com's brand for some time now. The Staples Center naming rights deal is only one move in a series of lavish attempts to gain attention and legitimacy within the sports world: At the 2021 Super Bowl, it aired a commercial featuring actor Matt Damon; in June and July of that year, it announced brand partnerships with Formula 1 and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC); in early 2022, it struck up a partnership with LeBron James's nonprofit, the LeBron James Family Foundation, and then aired another commercial at the 2022 Super Bowl featuring James; and in fall of 2022, it served as an official sponsor for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) World Cup held in Qatar. When the Staples Center naming deal was announced in November 2021, CEO Kris Marszalek repeated the company's future-thinking talking points to the Los Angeles Times: "This is just such a brilliant move from the guys at AEG, because the next decade belongs to crypto," adding "this positions LA and this particular venue right at the center of it" (Dean 2021).
[3.4] Crypto.com's marketing tactics and messaging orient its audience toward what Vincanne Adams et al. (2009) call an "anticipatory regime," a mode of social organization that offers "a future that may or may not arrive, is always uncertain and yet is necessarily coming and so therefore always demanding a response" (249). Anticipation, they argue, is therefore "not just betting on the future; it is a moral economy in which the future sets the conditions of possibility for action in the present, in which the future is inhabited in the present." Crypto.com's key selling point is not only the promise of return on investment for early adopters of cryptocurrency but also a privileged position in the coming technological paradigm. On the surface, Crypto.com's aggressive moves follow the marketing logic that you have to spend money to make money; as I discuss later, this was largely how it was received within the cryptocurrency subreddits, though the long-term profitability of buying stadium naming rights has been challenged (Leeds et al. 2007). Put another way, the company's logic seems to be that the broader public is still largely ignorant on the topic of cryptocurrency, and so Crypto.com's marketing push is meant to bring awareness to a massive part of that public: sports fans. Speculative hobbies such as fantasy leagues are common (though not ubiquitous) within sports fandom, offering a convenient meeting point with cryptocurrency culture.
[3.5] But Crypto.com's marketing here goes beyond simply building brand awareness. I suggest that the company's play for legitimacy through sports constitutes a corporate variant of "sportswashing," which Jules Boykoff (2022) describes as the longstanding phenomenon whereby "political leaders use sports to appear important or legitimate on the world stage while stoking nationalism and deflecting attention from chronic social problems and human woes on the home front" (342). Crypto.com's aggressive marketing moves, I argue, operated not only as a way of drawing new eyes to the brand but also of signaling to its current stakeholders/fans that everything is going well and they should continue to invest. Writing for the cryptocurrency promotional news site CoinDesk, David Z. Morris (2021) succinctly characterizes stadium naming deals as "the corporate equivalent of buying a Lamborghini: functionally almost useless, but a huge signal to the world that you're winning, exactly because you've got so much money to set on fire. Much in the way that day-trading gurus flaunt (rented) Lambos, this makes the success signal of a stadium name particularly attractive for companies that haven't actually 'made it' yet." This is not to judge whether the naming rights deal was a savvy move for Crypto.com, but rather to note that buying stadium name rights and sponsoring the FIFA World Cup serve a different purpose for Crypto.com than they do for more established companies making the same moves, like TD Bank or Coca-Cola. By inscribing itself on the landscape of Los Angeles in the form of the arena, Crypto.com presents its customers with a concrete visualization of the future it promises.
4. From Staples Center to Crypto.com Arena
[4.1] After the news of the arena naming deal broke on November 16, 2021, it received a wide range of reactions from interested audiences on Reddit. On r/nba, the name was met with a broadly negative response. Some commenters reacted with disgust over the cryptocurrency industry and its proponents—"Honestly, if you got rich off crypto good for you. But holy fuck am I sick of these crypto coins and NFTs. Sometimes I just want to enjoy my hobbies without having to hear all these get rich schemes all the time" (comment from deleted user, November 16, 2021). Another wrote: "Fake news or not, if I never hear about crypto or NFTs ever again in my life it'll be too soon" (u/Starlord_who, November 15, 2021). Some cast doubt on the twenty-year-long duration of the contract, speculating that Crypto.com would fail before then: "Lakers fans gotta hope they go bankrupt so the name rights go away" (u/HokageEzio, November 16, 2021). Many noted how awkward the name sounded—"really rolls off the tongue lmao" (u/LarryKoofer43, November 16, 2021); "literally the worst arena name in the league and the Smoothie King Center exists" (u/MakeAShadow, November 16, 2021). Some merely expressed ambivalence over the name change, pointing out that a corporate name is a corporate name—"I mean Staples is as shit of a naming right as any. It's just got history at this point" (u/PatronSaintOfUpdog, November 16, 2021). Overall, the attitude from basketball fans on Reddit was strongly negative, with even those who expressed indifference toward the particular name or the industry it represented demonstrating a dislike for the broader trend of corporate naming rights.
[4.2] It was something of a different story on r/lakers. Many still took a mocking tone—"as a fan of awful shitty names I love it" (u/multani14, December 6, 2021)—but in general, the response was more emotionally charged. As previously noted, the Staples Center had become an important site for community identification following the deaths of Kobe and Gianna Bryant in 2020, and reactions from the Lakers community broadly reflected that sentiment. In posts and comments on r/lakers, many fans proclaimed their refusal to call it by its new name—"Staples Center til [sic] I die" (u/renzonelisanchez, November 17, 2021)—shared their favorite Staples Center memories (u/GlakeBriffin, December 23, 2021), and repeated the sentiment that it would always be "the house that Kobe built" (u/gdghunter06, November 17, 2021).
[4.3] This claim was not unique to Reddit forums, it should be noted: responses from official channels and public figures associated with the team also proclaimed the significance of the Staples name and its connection to Bryant. Shaquille O'Neal, who had played with the Lakers alongside Bryant from 1996 until 2004, said on his podcast, "I'm glad they're taking the name of the Staples Center down, because that was our building...Congratulations to the owners for getting a new deal, but hey, the Staples Center belongs to Shaq and Kobe, forever" (quoted in Bengel 2021). Bryant's wife, Vanessa, shared a photo of the Staples Center on her Instagram story with the caption, "Forever known as 'The House That Kobe Built'" (@TheCrossover on Twitter, November 17, 2021). The official response from the team itself was, if possible, even more sentimental, aligning the Staples Center name with the Lakers brand and its purported values. On the night of their final game before the name change on December 23, the Lakers' official Twitter account shared an image of the building as the Staples Center with a lengthy eulogy attached: "There aren't many places that can make you feel, How STAPLES Center made you feel...STAPLES Center, the place we've called our home for 22 years. Home to who the Lakers have become, with 18,977 of you by our side. The name's changing, but this won't" (@Lakers, December 23, 2021). The final game that day continued to memorialize the arena's time as the Staples Center, with a special opening video that celebrated the era, commemorative T-shirts and tickets for the audience, and a half-time show featuring the team's past NBA Championship trophies. As these proclamations circulated across the r/lakers forum, they served as further evidence for fans that the Staples name meant something significant.
[4.4] Several nonplussed posts across r/nba and r/lakers noted that all of this seemed a bit much. The brick and mortar of the venue was not going away, after all; only the name was changing. Some pointed out that the Staples Center had received just as much fan antipathy when the Lakers relocated from the Great Western Forum (which itself had been renamed from simply the Forum in 1988 after Great Western Bank) in 1999—as one fan put it, "I'm old enough to remember that everyone hated the Staples Center when it opened...IMO Great Western Forum was the best name for an arena, nothing else is even close" (u/da_jumpman, December 6, 2012). Responses to these critiques emphasized the centrality of the name in fans' nostalgic remembering, particularly connected with Bryant: "To be honest, I don't associate the Staples Center with the office supply store. I associate it with the legendary Kobe/Shaq teams, and to a lesser extent the Kobe/Pau title teams as well" (u/Intelligent_Tutor994, December 25, 2021, referring to Pau Gasol, who played with the Lakers from 2008 to 2014). Another fan explained, "Kobe was my MJ growing up, he's the reason the Staples Center is what it is. With his passing, this feels like another loss. Gonna forever be Staples Center, 'the house that Kobe built' in my book" (u/ronnie1014, December 6, 2021).
[4.5] All told, the name change stoked a complicated reaction from the Lakers and NBA subreddits. It may be tempting to dismiss the backlash to Crypto.com Arena as an overemotional response to a stadium's name changing hands from one corporation to another, a shift that has become fairly routine within sports. These angry responses in the weeks following the announcement say nothing of the years that have passed since the new name went into effect, and realistically, many of these fans have adjusted to it to some extent. But the naming deal and the responses it elicited in an online fan space like r/lakers gesture to a couple relevant points within the study of sports fandom, highlighting the contradictions inherent to the process of forming a fan identity under these circumstances. On the one hand, the more neutral responses hold that the place of the stadium and its name do not matter, should not matter, as much as the team itself: Before the Crypto.com Arena and the Staples Center, the Lakers played at the Great Western Forum, and before that, they played at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, and before that, they were located in Minneapolis. R/lakers is itself a virtual community space that is not geographically situated, facilitating an expansion of the fandom beyond Los Angeles to anybody interested. On the other hand, responses that memorialize Kobe Bryant argue that the place very much does matter: From 2020 onward, the very building was formalized as a tribute to his memory. With the announcement of the new name, the Staples Center became a particular spatiotemporal focus for identification distinct from the Crypto.com Arena, a time and place where the Lakers dominated the NBA. The new name also brought the unwelcome reminder that sports is full of brand cultures, per Banet-Weiser, and to some extent a fan's sense of identity and community is necessarily, unwillingly shaped by whatever company currently holds naming rights for its home stadium. If and when a new corporation takes over the naming rights, it will likely serve as a new moment of reckoning for what being a fan of the team means.
[4.6] Another side of Reddit saw things from a very different perspective. While r/lakers was mourning the end of what was for many a formative era in their fan identity, the site's cryptocurrency fans were celebrating the anticipated start of a new one, shaped by the character of speculative time. The most frequent response to posts about the news on both r/cryptocurrency and r/Crypto_com was "bullish on CRO," referring to the sense that Cronos was surely about to experience a bull market turn. Common among posts and commenters was the feeling that this deal marked a turning point in cryptocurrency adoption and in technological development more broadly, echoing the messaging that Crypto.com pushed with the announcement: "It's honestly surreal how bullish this is for both CRO and the cryptosphere in general. Decades from now, this (and the rest of their billion dollar marketing campaign) will be looked at as one of the turning points in the mainstream adoption of crypto...Bullish on CRO to a truly astronomical degree and we are all still so early!" (u/dreamstersVIP, December 8, 2021). Another post expressing a similar level of optimism claims, "Correct me if I'm wrong, but CRO has to be the crypto with the strongest foundation in the sense that there is a professional sports arena named after it essentially. There is no chance this coin goes anywhere but up and up. I don't see any downside from here on out" (u/nikeboy299, November 18, 2021). The general consensus across both r/Crypto_com and r/CryptoCurrency was one of anticipation for the imminent mass adoption of cryptocurrency and the rise in Cronos' price.
[4.7] Many posts and comments expressed confusion over the vitriol coming out of the Lakers and basketball fandoms at the news: "Funny that people would rather latch onto a failing office supply store than accept this" (u/dwin31, December 21, 2021). Some posters dismissed the antipathy as simply fear of change (u/dfnk123, December 7, 2021); others recognized the role of the Staples Center's twenty-two years within Lakers fandom but focused on the new chapter to come: "5 championships were won being played in that building. Kobe Bryant, Stanley cup finals, summer X, UFC, etc. even other major events like Michael Jackson's funeral. People will get used to crypto.com eventually though. New sports memories to make" (u/ChristianMan710, December 21, 2021). Nostalgia for the stadium's perceived golden era, then, is refashioned into a promise of the future technological world.
[4.8] It should be noted that the cryptocurrency community's reaction to the deal was not universally positive, just as it wasn't universally negative on the Lakers' side. Several posters expressed doubt and even suspicion at the deal, particularly on r/Crypto_com. One post asks, "Am I the only one concerned at how much money CDC is spending on what could be considered 'frivolous' advertising?" (u/MPLS13, November 19, 2021). One Cronos holder, in a post titled "Unpopular opinion: New Arena name and great marketing does not necessarily make great product," points out what they see as the unsustainability of Crypto.com's business: "What are the actual technical advantages of CRO compared to BNB [note 2] for example? Or any other coin, do we need CRO actually? I realize that most people are only looking for profit, myself included, but if we want mainstream adoption of crypto there has to be something else than just the profits in mind. Well, that is a problem for all of crypto tbh not just CRO" (u/RippleBoi, December 7, 2021). This user highlights an important disjuncture within the cryptocurrency sphere: while on the one hand the rhetoric is centered around the next technological epoch defined by blockchain, cryptocurrency, and a decentralized internet, the day-to-day conversations that unfold on social networks are focused on the speculative value of this or that coin—how much one could supposedly trade it for now, and how much one could trade it for in the future. This is not to accuse the technofuturistic rhetoric of being disingenuous, but the logics of the speculative financial market are foundational to the ideology of the Web3 transformation, at least as proposed by Crypto.com. Mass adoption is about bringing about a technological revolution as much as it is about bringing in new buyers to raise the value of the current holders' assets.
[4.9] As reactions such as these indicate, there are plenty of cryptocurrency holders who do not take Crypto.com's messaging at face value and do not see the stadium name as a herald of imminent mass adoption. That said, the vast majority of comments on those posts dismiss the original poster's concerns: some repeat the logic that you have to spend money to make money—"ads pay off in an emerging market. It's a step towards mass adoption" (u/hateballrollin, November 19, 2021)—or argue that Crypto.com surely knows what they're doing—"they must have investors with deep pockets. Private company though, so we can't see the books" (u/BusyWhale, November 26, 2021). Others repeat the talking points from Crypto.com's marketing: "Mass adoption takes a bit of a risk. Fortune favors the bold" (u/iwishiremember, November 19, 2021).
[4.10] This rhetoric of risk returns us to the anticipatory regime that Adams et al. (2009) advance. In the days following the deal, the cryptocurrency subreddits were full of speculation over how high the price of Cronos would rise. Many focused on the date of the official name change, December 25, as the promised date for the price surge. While some expressed hope that it would rise to a dollar by Christmas (at the moment of the announcement, the value had been around 45 cents), others were thinking about things in the longer term: "I'm not celebrating until we reach $25. Hoping in 3–5 years" (u/contentcreater, November 23, 2021). The price did in fact rise, but only peaked at around 89 cents in late November and had already sharply dropped off by December 25 to around 55 cents. But this is the nature of the anticipatory regime: Cronos may have failed to go "to the moon" in that instance, but there is always the chance of a turnaround somewhere down the line. The phrase "buy the dip," popular in cryptocurrency circles, encourages holders to further invest in cryptocurrency during a downturn, insisting on the inevitability of the dip turning around, orienting investors' perspectives toward a perpetual not-yet. While December 25, 2021 had initially been the horizon for the promised shift to mass adoption, with that date come and gone, a temporal reconfiguration is needed to maintain faith in the future prosperity of Crypto.com and cryptocurrency more generally. The true pivotal moment is always yet to come.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] Acknowledging the variation within each group's responses, the reactions of the basketball and cryptocurrency subreddits broadly represent two contrasting relationships to the Staples Center/Crypto.com Arena's spatio-temporality. For Lakers fans on Reddit, the naming deal represented a radical break from a preferred time period that, with the passing of Kobe Bryant, could not be reclaimed, symbolizing their frustration with the team's recent lackluster performance and heightening their antipathy toward an especially unappealing corporate sponsor. For cryptocurrency fans, it also represented a radical break from the past, but instead offered a promising new era of economic prosperity, in line with Crypto.com's aggressive promises that its users would be at the head of a coming technological revolution. Some responses considered the Lakers fans' anger to be overblown, as the building itself was not being torn down—but I would argue that this is why it is useful to consider the venue in space and time together rather than one or the other. Within space-time, the Crypto.com Arena becomes a distinct entity from the Staples Center, which audiences interpret as ontologically separate.
[5.2] Against official rhetoric from the cryptocurrency sphere of a linear narrative of technological progress, the arena comes to represent a jumble of narratives, memories, pasts, and futures. For some particularly nostalgic Lakers fans, it will in some sense always be the Staples Center, although the number of those who continue to refer to it that way has presumably gone down with time. For Crypto.com and the wider cryptocurrency community, it represents a promise of the future, which has needed to be reworked and reconceptualized, as the passage of time still has not brought mass adoption—although, to be fair, we're still only two years into the twenty-year naming deal at the time that I write this. The promised future is always just over the horizon, even as the original date of that promised future, December 25, 2021, gets increasingly distant.
[5.3] In November 2022, the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed, with its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, arrested that December on charges of securities fraud and money laundering. FTX's naming rights deal with Miami-Dade County for the home arena of the Miami Heat was swiftly terminated, triggering a new round of speculation over whether Crypto.com might go the same way—"if Crypto.com Arena gets renamed, which company would you like to replace it?" (u/regnard, November 12, 2022). Most responses to this question offered either humorous answers or something along the lines of, "Never stopped calling it Staples center tbh" (u/archiegoodwinSD, November 11, 2022). Following the official name change, the fan relationship to the arena thus became one of simply waiting to see what new corporation will step in next.
[5.4] Ultimately, none of this says anything about the long-term viability of cryptocurrency or about what new company will inevitably replace Crypto.com, even if it manages to survive all twenty years of its lease with AEG. I write this knowing how quickly whatever I say will age, but to do so is also to highlight the state of constant speculation that the present moment exists in—whenever that present moment might be. Returning to Secular's (2023) study of the relationship between the NBA and Silicon Valley venture capital, he argues that the arena-as-media-platform, propped up as it is by technophilic hype about "state-of-the-art" venues, teeters constantly on the edge of obsolescence. Under these conditions, the buildings themselves become "monuments to ephemerality" (71). Much like the futuristic claims of cryptocurrency companies like Crypto.com, the technologically enabled arena must be constantly updated and renovated in order to maintain its aura of the cutting edge. Until Crypto.com fails or finally goes "to the moon," the name of the arena can only serve to represent the perpetual holding pattern that invested audiences find themselves in. Until then, Cronos holders must decide whether to keep buying the dip or walk away with what they have left; Lakers fans are left to renegotiate their understandings of what the building represents—what the team's brand as a whole represents—in the post-Staples era. The case of the Staples Center/Crypto.com Arena shows not only the melancholy among fans over the passing of a more "authentic" era, as seen in innumerable cases of branded stadiums; it also serves as a reminder of how sports fandom is shaped by the flow of capital. Although the stadium hasn't moved, its position of centrality and permanence within the fandom has been dislodged, instead coming to reflect the perpetual uncertainty that defines finance capitalism.