With the Cryptocurrency exchange's recent collapse, the Miami Heat's name rights contract was canceled. Miami's home arena will be temporarily known as Miami-Dade Arena while it seeks a new naming-rights partner.
The Miami Heat’s brief tenure at Miami-Dade Arena may come to an end before the playoffs, as Miami-Dade County seeks a new naming-rights agreement with a multinational software business headquartered on Brickell Avenue. Kaseya is in negotiations with Mayor Daniella Levine Cava’s administration to negotiate an agreement to place its name on the waterfront arena owned by the county and managed by the Heat, according to Levine Cava’s office on Thursday afternoon.
The potential deal comes on the heels of the collapse of the arena’s previous sponsor, the FTX crypto exchange, which signed a $135 million naming-rights agreement with Miami-Dade in 2021 only to file bankruptcy late last year following fraud allegations and criminal charges against then-CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
In January, a bankruptcy court overturned the county’s FTX deal, and the venue is now known as “the Miami-Dade Arena.” According to sources involved with the negotiations, a deal with Kaseya is near, and the administration hopes to present a definitive agreement to the County Commission at its April 4 meeting. There are already hints about the prospective deal online.
“Miami-Dade County is currently in active negotiations with Kaseya for a new naming rights agreement for the Miami-Dade Arena,” the statement read, using the arena’s temporary name after a bankruptcy court canceled the FTX agreement in January. “As soon as a potential deal is finalized we look forward to sharing more details with the Board of County Commissioners for their approval, and with our community.”
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Last month, commissioners authorized a $4.6 million subsidy for Kaseya as an incentive for adding 3,400 employees to its headquarters workforce. The money is only paid if Kaseya meets the agreed hiring objectives in subsequent years. It was founded in Silicon Valley in 2000 and migrated to Miami in 2015. They had roughly 50 employees at the time. It now employs 4,500 people worldwide. The Heat and Kaseya representatives were not available for comment on Thursday.
If Kaseya is awarded the contract, it will be the arena’s third corporate sponsor and the one with the lowest profile. American Airlines was the arena’s first naming-rights sponsor, followed by FTX, then a brand at the vanguard of a crypto boom and, in Bankman-Friend, a CEO who became known as a “blockchain billionaire.”
Kaseya develops and sells business software. There have been no specifics disclosed about a prospective arrangement, including how much Kaseya wants to pay for the sponsorship agreement. FTX’s 19-year pact averaged $7 million per year, with $15 million paid upfront until 2022.
The FTX money had been dedicated to a slew of new recreational and police activities as part of the “Peace and Prosperity Plan” aimed at reducing teenage violence, so the loss of the sponsorship arrangement threatened a financial constraint if the mayor couldn’t find a substitute.
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