Zondacrypto’s apparent financial turmoil is raising urgent questions about its future in sport – and the security of Canyon-SRAM’s title sponsorship.
The crypto industry’s uneasy relationship with cycling may be heading for another rupture.
A wave of troubling reports have emerged regarding Zondacrypto, the title sponsor of women’s WorldTeam Canyon-SRAM. Poland’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Zondacrypto (stylised zondacrypto), came on board as title sponsor of the team for three seasons (2025-27), with personal endorsements of riders including beloved Tour de France Femmes winner Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney, Tiffany Cromwell, and Agnieszka Skalniak-Sójka. The company has spoken of its support for women’s sports in particular, claiming on several occasions that “zondacrypto is a woman”.
Zondacrypto’s presence in the sport, especially against the backdrop of cycling’s other brushes with the industry, offered some hope (or, at least an absence of conspicuous red flags) for the viability of crypto providers as a sponsor.
Otherwise, the link between cycling and cryptocurrency has typically been a mess. To pick just a couple of lowlights: in 2021, Nexthash’s sponsorship of Qhubeka brought a beloved WorldTeam to a sordid end; more recently, Tadej Pogačar’s announcement of his ambassadorship of the KuCoin exchange saw widespread backlash amid questions around the legitimacy of the product he was lending his aura to. And that’s to say nothing of all the collapsed NFT and Web3 ventures that have been and gone in the cycling industry, almost exclusively leaving a trail of financial harm in their wake.
Sex toys, cybercrime, and cycling sponsorship: The bizarre tale of NextHash – CyclingTips
What’s the thread connecting cycling with North Korean military hackers and the adult industry? NextHash, Team Qhubeka’s last title sponsor.
Zondacrypto’s involvement in the sport has – until now – suggested it might be different, and at a diversified scale that exceeds other such sponsorships. In addition to the title sponsorship of the Canyon-SRAM team, the company also backs the Tour de Pologne, the women’s Giro d’Italia, and the Tour de Suisse. And that’s just scratching the surface of Zondacrypto’s investment in sport: the company also backs four Italian Serie A football clubs (including Juventus and Bologna), has its name splashed across the ice hockey arena in Davos, Switzerland, and the Miejski Stadion Piłkarski Raków football stadium in Częstochowa, Poland, and is the general sponsor of the Polish Olympic Committee and Polish Olympic team. The company’s domestic sponsorship alone has been placed at 10m złoty (about US$3.5 million).
All of that suggests a degree of financial security. A flurry of reports out of Poland over the past couple of weeks, however, suggest something else entirely. And if Zondacrypto fails, Canyon-SRAM could be left scrambling mid-cycle for a title sponsor—something that, as we have previously seen, is a deeply destabilising event, and carries a possibly existential risk.
The Zondacrypto origin story
The company was founded, then under the name BitBay, by the Polish entrepreneur Sylwester Suszek (we’ll come back to him). By 2021, it had been acquired by a foreign investment company, under which leadership it expanded from a powerhouse of the Polish crypto space into a more outward-looking venture. Licenses were acquired in crypto-friendly territories, notably including Estonia (where the company is officially registered), and rebranded first to Zonda, and then Zondacrypto. A flurry of sports sponsorships followed under its current CEO, Przemysław Kral, and the company broadened its horizons from an exclusive focus on bitcoin to incorporate the trade of over 70 other cryptocurrencies.
As is often the case with crypto platforms, the structure of the company is a touch labyrinthine. Zondacrypto is based in Poland – along with the bulk of its customers – but is Estonian registered under the name BB Trade Estonia OÜ, and controlled by the Swiss Divisio Holding AG. That puts a layer between its operations and those of Polish legislators, who have spent much of 2026 split into two camps on the question of crypto regulation (we’ll come back to that, too).
Trouble in Poland
From the outside, the first few months of this year have seen a reputational nose-dive for Zondacrypto, with scattered reports of trouble spiralling into major news within Poland. The past couple of weeks have been particularly bleak.
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