In Brief:
- Ava Labs VP of onchain finance Morgan Krupetsky takes FIFA’s blockchain ticketing to NYSE Live on July 20, 24 hours after the World Cup final wrapped at MetLife Stadium.
- Ava Labs reports that FIFA Collect put out over 100,000 Right-to-Buy tokens and processed north of $25 million in combined RTB and RTT transaction volume.
- Resale value flows back to FIFA rather than to StubHub or SeatGeek under this design — a structure that regulators in Switzerland, New York and New Jersey have started examining.
Ava Labs takes the pitch to Wall Street
Per an NYSE content update published the same day, Morgan Krupetsky, who serves as VP of Onchain Finance at Ava Labs, is slated for a Monday NYSE Live appearance to walk through the role blockchain played in ticket transactions at the FIFA World Cup. The slot comes 24 hours after the July 19 final at MetLife Stadium.
Elsewhere on the same NYSE schedule, BMO and Rex Shares handle the Closing Bell. The pre-market update came from Ashley Mastronardi.
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 ↗
Before joining Ava Labs, Krupetsky spent time at Citi as chief of staff, with a background in foreign exchange institutional investor sales.
What FIFA actually shipped
The FIFA blockchain — a customizable Avalanche Layer 1 — hosts FIFA Collect, with marketplace development led by Modex. Two instruments make the ticketing model work. The first, a Right-to-Buy, is a digital entitlement that grants priority access to purchase a specified ticket ahead of the public on-sale. Once redeemed, it converts into a Right-to-Ticket, and the purchase is finalized through FIFA’s own ticketing system.
Neither instrument is the ticket itself. RTBs are bought via FIFA Collect and can then change hands on secondary markets at whatever price the market supports.
Instead of rolling out a native token, FIFA chose to settle transactions in USDC.
The numbers
According to Ava Labs, RTB issuance topped 100,000, and more than 50,000 Club World Cup tickets went out alongside those rights. RTT trading volume crossed $15 million, while combined RTB and RTT volume moved past $25 million.
Arielle Pennington, Avalanche’s SVP of growth, said that over the span of a few days in June, FIFA ticket activity generated more than 60,000 transactions on Avalanche, with volume climbing “as much as 24x above normal levels” and active addresses rising roughly 10x — all before a single match had kicked off.
By mid-June, FIFA Collect had spun up more than 85,000 blockchain addresses. Secondary prices for the final climbed as high as $10,000.
Moving the middleman, not removing it
Dominic Carbonaro, head of the consumer enterprise vertical at Ava Labs, characterized the issue the system was designed to solve as “a little bit of the Taylor Swift problem”: bots hoover up inventory, and the resale market takes it from there.
The RTB structure, Carbonaro said, “shifts where the secondary sales market takes place.” Normally that demand-driven upside lands with StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats. FIFA’s approach keeps the activity within its own ecosystem, with smart contracts enforcing resale rules and every transfer recorded on an immutable ledger.
Skeptics have raised the obvious objection: when the tokens conveying the right to buy are themselves changing hands at a premium, scalping has been moved rather than eliminated.
Regulators are looking
In October 2025, Gespa — Switzerland’s gambling regulator — launched a preliminary investigation into whether conditional RTB tokens meet the definition of gambling instruments under Swiss law.
On July 15, a Frankfurt regional court issued a preliminary injunction against FIFA requiring it to reveal who the commercial sellers are on its official secondary ticket market. The complaint came from resale platform Ticombo.
Separate inquiries into FIFA’s ticketing practices have also been opened by New York Attorney General Letitia James and New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport.
Background
The Avalanche partnership was announced by FIFA in May 2025, on the heels of the Avalanche9000 upgrade that simplified custom L1 deployment. FIFA Collect finished migrating off Algorand in June 2025.
Francesco Abbate, Modex CEO, said Avalanche satisfied FIFA’s demands around performance, security and long-term scalability, and highlighted EVM compatibility as key to integrating with wallets fans already use.
June 9 also saw FIFA designate Kraken its Official Crypto Exchange Supporter — the first time a crypto platform has held such a role at a World Cup.
The ledger’s version of events and the reality at the gates diverged. Fans and media attempting to get into MetLife Stadium for Sunday’s final encountered what one outlet described as organized chaos.