Super Bowl LII: Patriots Fan Buys 50-Yard Line Tickets with 2.2 Bitcoins

Feb. 2 (UPI) — A New England Patriots fan used 2.2 bitcoins to buy seats to Super Bowl LII, according to secondary ticket marketplace TickPick.

The value for the 2.2 bitcoins was at $19,000 by the time the no-fee marketplace converted them to USD, according to TickPick co-CEO Brett Goldberg.

Goldberg said the man wished to remain anonymous. He has attended Super Bowls in the past, including last year’s Patriots win against the Atlanta Falcons at NRG Stadium in Houston.

He plans sit in the front row on the 50-yard line. The buyer bought the tickets by first transferring his bitcoin from a digital wallet. TickPick representatives were locked in to get the transaction to occur as quickly as possible, due to the volatility of the value for bitcoins. The transaction took about an hour to finish.

“In an hour you can see hundreds of dollars in swing,” Goldberg told UPI. “The second it hit my account it was transferred to U.S. dollars.”

“Me as a business, I don’t want to own bitcoin,” Goldberg said. “I don’t want to be exposed to the volatility.”

The buyer reached out to TickPick to ask if it would accept the unique payment medium. It was the first time bitcoin has been used in a transaction for Super Bowl tickets on the site.

Goldberg said TickPick hasn’t seen a dip in ticket prices or sales, despite the league experiencing a decline in TV ratings. He said TickPick has seen tickets at their highest value, from an average sale price standpoint.

Goldberg said some of the attraction for using bitcoin is that you can have 2 percent to 3 percent in credit card fees during a transaction, while bitcoin has around 0.1 percent.

TickPick said that the average listing price for tickets was at $5,214 on Friday, down 11.5 percent from Thursday. The get-in price for the game is at $3,470, a 4.27 percent increase from Thursday.

There were about 2,000 tickets available on the resale market as of Thursday night, according to TickPick. Fans from Pennsylvania accounted for 16.75 percent of the sales so far, followed by Massachusetts (14.5), Minnesota (11.5) and New Jersey (7.5).