On July 8, Kansas Athletics announced that an XRP logo would appear on the uniforms of all its teams, the first time a cryptocurrency has been placed on the jersey of a major college athletics program. Nine days later, Texas Tech announced a 15 year naming rights agreement with Galaxy, a digital assets and infrastructure company. The football stadium becomes Galaxy Stadium starting this season.
Both are frequently described as crypto NIL deals. Here’s what each agreement includes, and what it means for the athletes at both schools.
Two digital asset companies, two different purchases
Kansas bought into the patch boom. Texas Tech did something else.
The patch market has moved fast since Division I leaders approved commercial uniform patches in January, with deals now signed across dozens of schools and the biggest of them reaching eight figures a year. We covered that whole landscape, including the Kansas agreement, in Jersey Patch NIL Deals Are Here.
What’s worth separating out is the category. Ripple and Galaxy are both digital asset companies, and they arrived within nine days of each other by two different doors. Ripple took uniform space, which is advertising the school sells and renews. Galaxy took the stadium name for 15 years, which is a far longer and more permanent commitment than a patch, and a much rarer thing to sell.
That’s a category making a deliberate entrance rather than a coincidence.
What the athletes actually get
Both agreements name athlete benefits, and they are worth reading closely because they are not the same kind of thing.
Texas Tech says its naming rights agreement will include NIL opportunities for Texas Tech athletes. Terms were not disclosed and the structure has not been described publicly yet, so the details are still to come.
Kansas was more specific. Ripple agreed to fund financial and technology education programs for Kansas athletes and the wider campus community, covering both traditional finance and digital assets, and to expand a pipeline connecting Kansas graduates to careers in technology. The company’s chief executive is a Kansas alum, which is often how deals like this one begin.
Education and job placement are not cash, and they will not appear in anyone’s account this season. But for athletes across 16 teams at Kansas, most of whom will never sign an individual brand deal, career access may end up being worth more than a single payment would have been.
The part nobody is announcing
Here’s what both deals have in common. The money enters through the top of the building, and the department decides where it goes from there.
That works well at schools with inventory to sell. Most schools have less of it. A sponsorship tracking firm reported that roughly 95 percent of college patch inventory nationwide is still unsold, and the great majority of athletic departments have no stadium naming rights on the market at all.
That gap is the whole reason RallyFuel exists. Fans back a specific athlete by name, and the support goes to that athlete. Nobody has to sell a stadium first, and nothing has to trickle anywhere.
A company put its logo on 16 teams’ worth of uniforms this month. Every one of those athletes has people who would back them by name if somebody asked.
