Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few days, you’re aware that all of the major professional American sports leagues have suspended their seasons due to the coronavirus outbreak. Two NBA players tested positive for the virus, which prompted the NBA to suspend its season. The NHL followed suit today with the suspension of its season, and MLB suspended the rest of its spring training season.

On the collegiate side of things, NCAA Basketball conference tournaments and the main NCAA Tournament have been cancelled.

ZenSports is fully supportive of these league decisions, and we always want such decisions to be made with the public’s safety in mind over entertainment or profit reasons.

While our business and success here at ZenSports are predicated upon professional and collegiate sports being played, our business is irrelevant if the entire world gets sick or is dying. Safety first.

Of course, we still have a business to manage, and we feel confident that ZenSports will weather the storm and come out of this situation stronger for the following reasons:

1. We don’t believe that this situation will be permanent. The American sports leagues have not given a specific timetable for their return, but all of the leagues have left the door open to resume the regular season, and/or in the case of the NBA and NHL, to start the playoffs on schedule in April. We are confident that once health officials give the leagues the thumbs up to resume play, that they will do so, even if it means having empty arenas and stadiums.
2. ZenSports still has plenty of soccer/football bets going on. Keep in mind that ZenSports is not just an app for betting on American sports. Other countries that have done a better job of virus containment still have soccer/football matches taking place, and those bets are flowing through ZenSports as normal.
3. Our product and development teams aren’t missing a beat. We’re launching fiat deposits and withdrawals on March 31st, which will allow customers to deposit funds directly into ZenSports via debit card and wire transfer, and will allow customers to make withdrawals via wire transfer (without having to use Skrill). After we launch fiat deposits/withdrawals, we’re going to be building and launching a mobile web version of our app in Q2.
4. We’re getting significant interest from sports and media industry partners to white label our product, SPORTS token API, and rewards/loyalty program. These next few weeks will allow us to put together decks, flyers, landing pages, and other business development materials so that we can really hit the ground running to ramp up these biz dev efforts once the virus situation is behind us and the leagues are playing again.
5. Digital marketing efforts are ready to go. For all of the aforementioned reasons, we’re still open for business, taking customers, and accepting soccer/golf bets. There’s no reason to slow these efforts down at this time.

Startup entrepreneurs are like cockroaches — the best of them can’t be killed. We have an amazing team, a beloved product, and are in a fast growing industry. The world is always going to bring us challenges, and while the coronavirus situation is unique, it’s a challenge that we will overcome.

The entire ZenSports team wants to extend our wishes to everyone to keep safe, but to still enjoy life and have fun. We’ll be here and ready for you when you are.