If you’ve spent any time following Canadian MMA and the mixed martial arts scene as a whole across North America over the last several years, you’ve probably seen the letters “BTC” attached to a fight poster, a UFC prospect’s early record, or a viral knockout clip on Instagram.
BTC Fight Promotions has quietly become one of the most important organizations in Canadian combat sports, building a pipeline that has sent fighters like Jasmine Jasudavicius and Loopy Godinez all the way to the UFC.
For casual fans who only tune into the big leagues, BTC might be an unfamiliar name but for anyone who actually wants to understand where the next wave of Canadian talent is coming from, BTC Fight Promotions is where it’s at.
Your Introduction to BTC Fight Promotions
BTC Fight Promotions is a professional and amateur mixed martial arts organization based in Burlington, Ontario, Canada.
The promotion bills itself as Ontario’s No. 1 MMA organization, and the claim carries real weight: BTC holds the record for the most shows ever produced by an Ontario-based fight promotion, with roughly 40 events staged across the province and beyond since its founding.
Unlike a global brand such as the UFC or Bellator, BTC operates as a regional development promotion, meaning its core purpose is to give emerging Canadian fighters, both amateur and professional, a legitimate stage to compete on before they’re ready for the international spotlight.
That developmental identity is central to how BTC describes itself. The promotion has repeatedly stated that its mission is regional development for organizations like the UFC, PFL, and ONE Championship, essentially functioning as a proving ground where raw talent gets tested, refined, and eventually scouted.
This is, in fact, a familiar model in combat sports. American promotions like the Legacy Fighting Alliance and Cage Fury Fighting Championships serve a nearly identical function south of the border, feeding fighters into the UFC’s talent pipeline year after year.
BTC has become that same on-ramp for Ontario and, increasingly, for fighters across Canada.
Ontario MMA Origin Story: How BTC Fight Promotions Began
BTC Fight Promotions was founded in 2017 by Irene Starr, who set out to build a circuit that would give Ontario-based MMA athletes a consistent platform to compete on at home rather than traveling out of province, or out of the country, for opportunities.
The promotion’s debut event, BTC 1: Genesis, took place in May 2017, and the organization has run events on a near-continuous basis ever since.
That first show set the tone for what would become BTC’s signature approach: fast finishes, hometown fighters, and a genuine focus on developing talent rather than simply importing name-brand veterans for a quick payday.
The timing of BTC’s founding mattered enormously. Ontario had only legalized professional mixed martial arts in August 2010, a shift that paved the way for UFC 129 at Toronto’s Rogers Centre in April 2011, one of the largest regulated MMA events ever held in Canada.
In the years that followed, the regional promotion Score Fighting Series became the province’s dominant local circuit, but when it folded around 2013, it left a noticeable void in Ontario’s homegrown MMA scene. BTC representatives have since described that gap directly, noting there was no consistent place left for Ontario fighters to actually compete, which is precisely the opening BTC was built to fill.
Since then, BTC has grown from a single Burlington show into a province-wide operation with a genuine national footprint.
The promotion now credits itself with helping thirteen athletes reach major organizations, including the UFC, Bellator, and ONE Championship, in just under 40 events, a conversion rate that stacks up favorably against many well-known American regional promotions of similar size.
Where You Can Catch an Event: BTC Fight Promotions Across Ontario’s Map and Beyond
Burlington, Ontario is home base for BTC, and the city has hosted more BTC events than anywhere else, with roughly ten shows staged there, many at the city’s Central Arena.
But describing BTC as a Burlington-only promotion would understate its actual reach. Over the years, the organization has brought professional and amateur fight cards to Toronto, Oakville, Peterborough, Windsor, Ottawa, Niagara Falls, Kitchener, St. Catharines, London, Kingston, Oshawa, Belleville, Sarnia, Mississauga, and Hamilton, effectively touring most of southern and eastern Ontario over the course of a single promotional run.
The organization has even ventured outside Ontario entirely, staging cards in Vancouver and Edmonton, a sign that BTC’s ambitions extend past its home province.
Each new city tends to come with its own storyline.
When BTC brought fights to Peterborough’s Memorial Centre in November 2018 for BTC 4: Vendetta, just under 2,000 fans packed the venue, a genuinely strong regional draw for a promotion that was barely a year old at the time.
When BTC finally cracked Mississauga in July 2025 with BTC 30: Future Legends, it marked the promotion’s debut in a city long considered part of the Greater Toronto Area’s competitive fight scene. That pattern, entering a new market and treating it as a milestone, has become part of BTC’s brand identity and a smart audience-building strategy for a regional promotion still expanding its geographic footprint.
Venues have varied widely to match each market, from the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium and the Scotiabank Convention Centre in Niagara Falls to smaller, community-oriented spaces like Sikorski Hall in Oshawa and the Belleville Armouries.
That flexibility, scaling production up or down depending on the market, is a hallmark of how regional MMA promotions typically operate, and it’s a big part of how BTC has managed to run dozens of events without the massive infrastructure budget of a global promotion.
Inside a BTC Fight Card: Structure, Divisions, and Talent Development
A typical BTC card blends amateur and professional bouts on the same night, a format often called “Pro-Am” within the industry.
This structure lets BTC showcase fighters at every stage of development, from first-time amateurs testing the cage environment to seasoned professionals angling for a look from a major organization.
In May 2025, BTC pushed this concept even further with BTC 28: Battle at the Border in Sarnia, which the promotion has described as Ontario’s first-ever all-amateur MMA event, a notable structural experiment that gave newer fighters an entire card built specifically around their development rather than sharing the spotlight with professional headliners.
Matchmaking for BTC cards is handled by a dedicated internal team, and the promotion’s broader staff includes a promotions lead, a media and marketing department, and administrative support that coordinates everything from venue logistics to fighter credentialing.
This kind of organizational structure, small but specialized, is fairly standard for a mid-sized regional promotion, and it allows BTC to run several events per year without the enormous overhead of a national broadcast operation. The promotion typically runs multiple cards annually, often spacing events roughly a month or two apart during active stretches of the calendar, giving both fans and fighters a fairly predictable rhythm to follow.
Weight classes and regional championships also give BTC’s roster continuity between events. The organization has crowned champions in divisions like lightweight and women’s strawweight, and title fights tend to headline or co-headline cards, giving local fans storylines and rivalries to follow over multiple events rather than treating every card as a standalone spectacle.
From BTC to the Big Leagues: The Promotion’s UFC and Bellator Alumni
The clearest evidence of BTC’s impact isn’t in its marketing copy, it’s in the fight records of the athletes who came up through its cards.
Jasmine Jasudavicius is probably the promotion’s most prominent success story. The St. Catharines-based flyweight fought at BTC 8: Eliminator in November 2019, and within two years she’d earned a UFC contract through Dana White’s Contender Series.
By 2025, Jasudavicius had climbed into the UFC’s women’s flyweight top 15, and her first-round submission win over former strawweight champion Jessica Andrade at UFC 315 earned her a $50,000 Performance of the Night bonus, one of the clearest signs yet that BTC’s talent pipeline can produce genuine UFC-caliber athletes.
Loopy Godinez, born in Mexico and raised in Vancouver after her family relocated due to safety concerns, is another BTC alumna who has gone on to become a fixture in the UFC’s strawweight rankings, reaching the top six in the division by 2025. Her rise included a UFC-record stretch of fighting three times in just 43 days, a feat that drew public comparisons from UFC president Dana White to rising star Khamzat Chimaev.
Beyond Jasudavicius and Godinez, BTC’s alumni list includes former UFC competitors Jesse Ronson, Kyle Prepolec, Kyle Nelson, and Cheyanne Buys, ONE Championship’s Jeff Chan, Bellator’s Aaron Jeffery, and UFC fighter Serhiy Sidey, among others who have gone on to sign with major organizations after coming up through BTC cards.
This alumni track record is exactly why serious MMA fans, scouts, and matchmakers pay attention to BTC results, even when the promotion itself doesn’t have national television distribution.
A strong performance at a BTC event carries genuine credibility within the Canadian MMA community, in much the same way that a standout LFA or Cage Fury FC performance does within the American regional scene.
For fighters, that credibility can be the difference between staying an anonymous local competitor and getting a legitimate shot at the sport’s biggest stage.
BTC Records, Rivalries, and Signature Moments in its Own MMA History
BTC maintains a public “Hall of Records” tracking the promotion’s fastest finishes and most dominant performances, and the numbers offer a fun window into just how much action these cards deliver.
The fastest professional knockout in BTC history belongs to Mel Zeman, who finished a fight in just 19 seconds at BTC 24: Apex in June 2024, narrowly edging out Tony Laramie’s 25-second knockout on the very same card.
On the submission side, Julius Trimmeliti holds the record with a 27-second guillotine choke victory at BTC 5: Typhoon back in March 2019, a mark that has stood for years despite dozens of subsequent events.
For pure volume of action, BTC 29: Prometheus in June 2025 stands out as the promotion’s most explosive single card, producing 12 total finishes, six by knockout and six by submission, in one night at Burlington’s Central Arena.
In terms of individual longevity, Adam Assenza holds the record for most career victories inside the BTC cage with ten wins, making him something of a franchise player for the promotion across its history.
These kinds of internal records matter for more than just trivia purposes; they give the promotion searchable, snippet-worthy content and give longtime fans a sense of continuity and legacy that a purely event-by-event promotion would lack.
How to Watch BTC Fight Promotions Online & How to Buy Tickets
For years, catching a BTC card meant showing up in person, and live attendance remains central to the promotion’s identity.
Tickets for BTC events are typically sold through Ticketscene, and the promotion actively promotes each new show through its own website alongside a fairly robust social media presence that includes Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and X (formerly Twitter).
As of 2026, BTC’s Instagram account has built an audience in the tens of thousands, and its TikTok channel has generated tens of thousands of likes, reflecting the promotion’s emphasis on short-form highlight content to reach younger MMA fans who discover fighters through clips before they ever buy a ticket.
On the broadcast side, BTC announced a multi-event streaming partnership with Spectation Sports LLC, a U.S.-based combat sports streaming company, giving fans outside the immediate event radius a way to watch cards live online rather than relying solely on in-arena attendance.
The promotion has also used the streaming platform Liftpass for online viewing access to select shows.
Beyond live events, BTC produces its own recap content through a YouTube series called “BTC Fight Rewind,” and the organization runs a podcast available on Spotify, giving fans deeper access to fighter interviews and behind-the-scenes promotion news between events.
What’s Next for BTC Fight Promotions in Canada: Get Your Tickets
BTC’s 2026 schedule shows no signs of the promotion slowing down.
The year has already included BTC 37: MMA Expo in June, BTC 38: Summer Smackdown at Mississauga’s Don Kolov Arena in July, and BTC 39: Vanguard in Oshawa in September, with BTC 40 and BTC 41 already booked for October and November, the latter returning to the Hamilton Convention Centre.
BTC offers something the UFC simply can’t: the chance to watch a future contender’s very first professional fight, in a local arena, for a fraction of the cost of a major pay-per-view ticket.
Given the promotion’s track record of producing legitimate UFC and Bellator talent, from Jasmine Jasudavicius to Loopy Godinez and beyond, there’s a reasonable chance that whoever headlines BTC’s next Burlington or Hamilton card could be someone the wider MMA world is talking about within a year or two.
BTC Fight Promotions has spent nearly a decade building something that doesn’t always get the national spotlight but absolutely deserves it: a legitimate, well-organized pathway for Ontario’s best amateur and professional fighters to develop, compete, and eventually break into the sport’s biggest organizations.
From its founding to its current status as the record-holder for most shows by an Ontario-based promotion, BTC has consistently filled a role that Canadian MMA badly needed after Score Fighting Series folded.
With alumni now competing at the highest levels of the UFC, a growing footprint that stretches from Burlington to Vancouver, and an ambitious 2026 slate already underway, BTC Fight Promotions has earned its title as Ontario’s No. 1 MMA organization.
For fans looking to spot Canada’s next breakout fighter before anyone else does, there may be no better place to start watching than the next BTC Fight Promotions event. Get your tickets today from Ticketscene.
