In Brief:
- Morgan Krupetsky, VP of onchain finance at Ava Labs, is discussing FIFA‘s blockchain ticketing on NYSE Live on July 20, one day after the World Cup final at MetLife Stadium.
- FIFA Collect issued more than 100,000 Right-to-Buy tokens and cleared over $25 million in combined RTB and RTT transaction volume, per Ava Labs.
- The model routes resale value back to FIFA instead of StubHub or SeatGeek, and it has drawn regulatory attention in Switzerland, New York and New Jersey.
Ava Labs takes the pitch to Wall Street
Ava Labs VP of Onchain Finance Morgan Krupetsky is appearing on NYSE Live on Monday to discuss how blockchain affected ticket transactions at the FIFA World Cup, according to an NYSE content update issued the same day. The segment lands a day after the July 19 final at MetLife Stadium.
The same NYSE programming day has BMO and Rex Shares ringing the Closing Bell. Ashley Mastronardi delivered the pre-market update.
A better way into the World Cup:
FIFA Collect used Avalanche (official site) to provide priority World Cup ticket access, enable secondary trading, and verify ownership through a familiar experience.
@MorganKrupetsky breaks it down on @NYSE Live.@AvalancheView on X ↗
Krupetsky came to Ava Labs from Citi, where she was chief of staff and worked in foreign exchange institutional investor sales.
What FIFA actually shipped
FIFA Collect runs on the FIFA blockchain, a customizable Avalanche Layer 1, with Modex leading marketplace development. The ticketing model turns on two instruments. A Right-to-Buy is a digital entitlement granting priority access to purchase a specific ticket before it goes on public sale. Redeem it and it becomes a Right-to-Ticket, which completes the purchase through FIFA’s own ticketing system.
Neither is the ticket. Fans buy RTBs through FIFA Collect and trade them on secondary markets at whatever the market will bear.
FIFA settled transactions in USDC rather than launching a native token.
The numbers
Ava Labs puts RTB issuance above 100,000 and says more than 50,000 Club World Cup tickets were distributed alongside those rights. RTT trading volume passed $15 million. Combined RTB and RTT volume passed $25 million.
Arielle Pennington, SVP of growth at Avalanche, said FIFA ticket activity produced more than 60,000 transactions on Avalanche over a few days in June, with volume rising “as much as 24x above normal levels” and active addresses up roughly 10x. That was before a match had been played.
FIFA Collect had created more than 85,000 blockchain addresses as of mid-June. Demand for the final pushed secondary prices as high as $10,000.
Moving the middleman, not removing it
Dominic Carbonaro, who leads the consumer enterprise vertical at Ava Labs, described the problem the system was built to address as “a little bit of the Taylor Swift problem.” Bots buy the inventory, then the resale market takes over.
Carbonaro said the RTB structure “shifts where the secondary sales market takes place.” Traditionally StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats capture the demand-driven upside. FIFA’s version keeps that activity inside its own ecosystem, with resale rules enforced by smart contract and every transfer written to an immutable ledger.
Critics have made the obvious point. If the tokens granting the right to buy are themselves trading at a premium, scalping hasn’t been eliminated so much as relocated.
Regulators are looking
Switzerland’s gambling authority, Gespa, opened a preliminary investigation in October 2025 into whether conditional RTB tokens qualify as gambling instruments under Swiss law.
A Frankfurt regional court granted a preliminary injunction against FIFA on July 15, ordering it to disclose the identities of commercial sellers on its official secondary ticket market. Resale platform Ticombo brought the complaint.
New York Attorney General Letitia James and New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport have each opened separate inquiries into FIFA’s ticketing practices.
Background
FIFA announced the Avalanche partnership in May 2025, following the Avalanche9000 upgrade that made custom L1s easier to deploy. FIFA Collect completed its move off Algorand in June 2025.
Modex CEO Francesco Abbate said Avalanche met FIFA’s requirements for performance, security and long-term scalability, and pointed to EVM compatibility for integration with existing wallets.
FIFA also named Kraken its Official Crypto Exchange Supporter on June 9, the first time a crypto platform has held that designation at a World Cup.
Whatever the ledger recorded, the gates told a different story. Fans and media trying to enter MetLife Stadium for Sunday’s final ran into what one outlet called organized chaos.
