UM men’s basketball team offered endorsement deals by charitable cryptocurrency company

Similar to their football counterpart, the Miami Hurricanes’ entire men’s basketball team is being offered the opportunity to profit off endorsements through college sports’ new name, image and likeness (NIL) legislation.

Every Miami men’s basketball player is being offered a $6,000-per-year endorsement deal by Yummy Crypto, a charity cryptocurrency company that launched in May.

Corey Johnson, Yummy Crypto’s director of partnerships, said players will receive the crypto equivalent of $500 every month in cryptocurrency exchange wallets created for them where they can exchange their cryptocurrency into their bank accounts.

The players who decide to opt into the deal will start to receive monthly payments of $500 for one year starting in September and will endorse Yummy Crypto through their social media amounts or in-person appearances by promoting Yummy Crypto’s merchandise, charitable actions or other marketing activities.

If every men’s basketball player accepts the deal, Yummy Crypto’s investment could be over $70,000 in the first year.

The men’s basketball team’s deal with Yummy Crypto was helped put together by Dan Lambert, who founded the Bring Back The U marketing company.

Lambert is also the founder of American Top Team, one of the nation’s top training academies for MMA fighters, which offered a similarly structured $500-a-month endorsement deal to every Hurricanes’ football scholarship player.

Lambert and Johnson both said that investment sparked Yummy Crypto’s offer to the program’s men’s basketball team.

“When we initiated the Bring Back The U plan and we started off with the football deal through American Top Team we got some press on it,” Lambert said, “and we were hoping to take advantage of some of that momentum that was generated.”

Yummy Crypto is a charitable cryptocurrency backed by blockchain technology.

According to the Yummy Crypto’s website, the company has donated over $1 million dollars to Binance Lunch For Children, which ran by the Binance Charity Foundation — the philanthropic side global cryptocurrency exchange Binance.

Three percent of transactions involving Yummy Crypto are donated to charity.

“In the first month of Yummy Crypto, we donated $1 million to end world hunger. It didn’t get picked up in the news. We were like ‘OK, if we want to continue our mission of ending world hunger and helping out these charities, we need to get our name out there even more,’” Johnson said of the deal, which was first reported on Friday by Rivals’ CaneSport.com.

“I saw the deal Mr. Lambert made with the football team and saw he was helping these kids out.”

Johnson added his own experience as a college athlete inspired this investment by Yummy Crypto.

“I was a walk-on college basketball player at one point,” he said. “These kids need some support.”

Instead of paying the Hurricanes’ men’s basketball players with Yummy Coins, Johnson said Yummy Crypto will exchange their coins for it for USDT — which is known as Tether, the third largest cryptocurrency based by market cap.

Tether is a stablecoin — a stable-value cryptocurrency — that mirrors the price of the U.S. dollar, according to coinmarketcap.com

“We don’t want them to worry about the value of their hard-earned money,” Johnson said. “If we send them any other crypto other than Tether, it’s going to go up or down. We want to make sure they get exactly $500 so they don’t have to worry.”

And through Bring Back The U, Lambert hopes to generate more interest from other companies to offer deals to Miami athletic programs.

“The football team has an impact on my life — so now with the NIL legislation I have a chance to make an impact on those players,” Lambert said. “I’ve never thought it was fair that they worked so hard and generated so many billions of dollars a year and these athletes don’t really get to share the pie other than the educational side, which is not nothing, certainly.

“But I don’t think it’s enough and I think a lot of people agree with that. Now that it’s here, fans have a chance to direct these players lives and reward them for all of the hard work they do.”

And he hopes every team is able to be offered similar endorsement deals like the football and men’s basketball teams have.

“I said it a couple of times before: I’d like Miami to be known as NIL U,” Lambert said, “where all athletes are taken care of.”