Florida Athletics has signed a multi-year sponsorship agreement with Ripple that will put the XRP logo on the field at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium from the 2026 football season, with the deal reportedly worth $5m (£3.9m) per year.
The partnership, announced on 4 September, will also include branding across Florida Athletics’ digital platforms and event signage. Ripple will provide education in finance and technology for Florida’s student-athletes and the wider University of Florida community.
The financial terms have not been disclosed by either Florida or Ripple. However, an Associated Press report said the agreement was valued at $5m annually, citing a person familiar with the negotiations.
Florida Athletics, the University of Florida’s intercollegiate sports programme commonly known as the Florida Gators, will become one of the highest-profile college sports programmes to feature cryptocurrency branding on its playing surface.
The agreement is possible because of a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rule change introduced for regular-season football games in 2024. The regulations allow schools to sell one commercial advertisement at midfield, along with up to two smaller advertisements elsewhere on the field.
Those arrangements can run for an entire season or be agreed on a game-by-game basis.
Florida had already used the new rules to sell field advertising to Geico during the final two home games of the 2025 season. According to AP, the insurer paid $1m per game.
The Ripple agreement represents a longer-term commercial commitment as Florida progresses with a planned $1.45bn redevelopment of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, widely known as the Swamp. The renovation is scheduled to be completed before the 2030 football season.
The deal also expands Ripple’s involvement in United States college athletics. Two months earlier, the company agreed a multi-year partnership with the University of Kansas that will place XRP branding on Jayhawk uniforms across the school’s athletic programme.
Ripple described the Kansas arrangement as the first cryptocurrency sponsorship to appear on the jersey of a major college athletics programme.
Education is another central part of the Florida agreement. The programme will cover traditional financial topics as well as digital assets for students and athletes.
Ripple has previously pledged $25m to education programmes in the United States. The company said the results of its first-year grants included support for 48,108 DonorsChoose projects. Funding for Teach For America provided stipends for 2,300 new teachers and helped introduce blockchain training in high schools.
Ripple has also developed university partnerships aimed at creating applications for the XRP Ledger. Its accelerator programme with the University of California, Berkeley involved nine start-ups working in areas including payments, tokenised markets, insurance and the creator economy.
The participating companies received technical support and presented their work to Ripple representatives, developers and venture capital firms.
XRP is the native digital asset of the XRP Ledger, a public, decentralised blockchain designed to enable fast, low-cost transfers. The network uses validators rather than proof-of-work mining to reach consensus, and transactions generally settle within seconds.
The Florida agreement will therefore put the cryptocurrency brand in front of large football audiences while linking Ripple’s presence at the university to advertising, student-athlete support and education.
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