Soccer’s biggest tournament has always been good at drawing massive crowds. This year, it is also drawing crypto exchanges, blockchain platforms, and a small army of meme token opportunists riding the hype.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup, expanded to 48 teams and 104 matches across 16 host cities in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, is wrapping up its Canadian leg with matches at Vancouver’s BC Place stadium, with the final Canadian-hosted match concluding around July 8. The spectacle on the pitch is familiar. What is happening off it is something new.

Kraken kicks off a World Cup first

On June 9, 2026, FIFA named Kraken its Official Crypto Exchange Supporter, making it the first crypto exchange to hold that designation in World Cup history.

The partnership is focused on fan engagement initiatives across all host cities, with Vancouver among the priority markets. In practical terms, that means Kraken’s branding appears alongside the tournament infrastructure while the exchange works to introduce mainstream sports audiences to crypto products.

FIFA Collect, Avalanche, and the NFT angle

Beyond the Kraken deal, FIFA has been running its digital collectibles platform, FIFA Collect, on a dedicated Avalanche-based blockchain. The platform handles NFTs and digital collectibles tied to the tournament, representing a deliberate shift away from FIFA’s previous blockchain partnerships.

Meanwhile, national team fan tokens on the Chiliz blockchain have been trading actively throughout the tournament, with token values moving in response to live match results. A team advances, its fan token tends to spike. A shock elimination sends it in the other direction. For traders who follow match schedules closely, the tournament has functioned like a series of scheduled volatility events with publicly known start times.

Fan tokens have existed in the sports world for several years now, but a 48-team World Cup with matches running nearly every day provides an unusually dense calendar of potential price catalysts. That dynamic has kept Chiliz-linked assets in active rotation among short-term traders during Vancouver’s match window.

The meme token problem FIFA did not create but cannot ignore

Here is where things get messier. Despite the official partnerships with Kraken, the Avalanche-based FIFA Collect platform, and the Chiliz fan token ecosystem, FIFA has not issued an official FIFA World Cup 2026 token.

That absence has not stopped dozens of unofficial meme tokens from filling the vacuum.

Unofficial tokens carrying World Cup branding, country names, and player likenesses have proliferated across low-cap markets, trading on the association with a globally watched event while carrying none of the legitimacy of the official partnerships. Some are straightforward speculative instruments. Others carry the structural hallmarks of rug pulls and coordinated pump-and-dump schemes targeting fans who are new to crypto and searching for ways to financially participate in the tournament.

For anyone looking at this space, the practical filter is straightforward: Kraken’s official partnership is verifiable. FIFA Collect on Avalanche is verifiable. Fan tokens on the Chiliz platform for participating national teams are verifiable. Everything else claiming a FIFA or World Cup affiliation deserves significant skepticism and independent verification before any capital goes near it.