Oakland A’s selling discount luxury suites for Bitcoin

The Oakland A’s are selling luxury suites for the entire 2021 season for exactly one Bitcoin. The deal is available until Opening Day—April 1.

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The suites have a regular season price of $64,800, meaning that at the press time price of almost $56,000, the deal comes with a discount of almost $9,000.

The deal will allow the team’s “fans to become the first Bitcoin suite holders in sports,” said A’s President Dave Kaval, in a statement. “We’re excited to be one of a handful of teams to accept cryptocurrency for payment and the first to price tickets in crypto instead of U.S. currency.”

The team is pitching the offer as a gamble, with Kaval noting that suites’ prices will fluctuate with the price of bitcoin, which he said, “adds to the excitement.”

Of course, that means if bitcoin rises past $64,800 by the season’s close on Oct. 8, purchasers will have overpaid—assuming they aren’t selling BTC to pay for the suite in the first place. It also assumes that with highly effective vaccines being rolled out, there will be a full season.

Kaval pitched the deal as a way to watch games safely, noting that suites—which league rules currently limit to six people—“are the perfect way for groups who want to safely socially distance themselves from other fans to enjoy A’s baseball this season.”

The rules allow stadium seats to be sold in socially distanced “pods” of two to four people.

A number of teams accept crypto, notably basketball’s Mark Cuban-owned Dallas Mavericks, which have been accepting bitcoin for tickets and merchandise through cryptocurrency payment processor BitPay since the 2018-2019 season.

On March 4, the team announced that it would also accept payment in Dogecoin, the meme-themed cryptocurrency Cuban has joined fellow billionaire Elon Musk in touting.

*About 20,000 Dogecoin worth of Mavs merchandise (Photo: Dalas Mavericks)*

Two days later, Cuban tweeted that the Mavericks had received 20,000 Dogecoins in transactions, making the team, he shouted in capital letters, “the LARGEST #DOGECOIN MERCHANT IN THE WORLD!”

Of course, at the March 6 price of $0.05098 per Dogecoin, Cuban was saying the team had made $59.80 in merchandise. Which would buy one $55 Dallas Mavericks Nike City Edition 20-21 Varsity White Polo shirt.

He continued that if the team sells another 6.6 billion DOGE—$39.2 million—worth of merchandise, “#dogecoin will DEFINITELY HIT $1 !!!”