10 Crypto Sports All-Stars
“The Fed continues to print trillions of dollars,” the bitcoin advocate said. “The best defense against inflation I think is bitcoin, and they will keep printing money.”
The man spoke crypto fluently. He sounded like a speaker at a Bitcoin conference. And in fact he was a speaker at a Bitcoin conference. But he also happens to be future Hall of Fame Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who is one of CoinDesk’s first Crypto Sports All-Stars.
This piece is part of CoinDesk’s Sports Week.
It’s a solid list. It is packed with elite players from the National Football League, tennis players and football players who all believe in the power of decentralized self-defeating finance. We narrowed it down to 10, and the list is admittedly arbitrary — LeBron James would love to have a word — but it gives a sense of how deeply crypto has flowed into mainstream professional sports.
Oh, and as for the return on your crypto investment? For each Crypto All-Star, we tried to calculate what you would have won – or lost – if you invested $1,000 in the All-Star’s chosen project at the time of his or her announcement.
So let’s meet the team and grow your fortune!
1. Team Captain: Tom Brady
Did Brady curse bitcoin? On May 9, 2021, with the price of bitcoin hovering around $58,000, the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers added “laser eyes” to his Twitter avatar. The price then dropped to $30,000. “Okay, the laser eyes didn’t work,” Brady admitted. “Anyone have any ideas?”
Yes, there were more ideas! He had the idea of using a flamethrower to thaw a block of ice with bitcoin inside. (It was in a commercial for crypto exchange FTX.)
He launched a non-fungible token (NFT) collection that sold out in under 10 minutes. He and his wife, Gisele, now have equity in FTX, and Brady co-founded NFT platform Autograph, which raised a cool $170 million in January.
Perhaps most graciously, after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin claimed he doesn’t even know who Brady is, the football player tweeted, “What’s going on Vitalik! You may not know me but just wanted to say I’m a big fan of yours.”
2. Lionel Messi
When you go to the website of fantoken Socios.com, the first thing you see is a giant picture of Argentine soccer player Lionel Messi’s bearded mug. He has a big smile and he proudly holds his phone to show the Socios app. Messi has good reason to smile: He signed a mammoth $20 million deal to promote Socios, explaining that he wanted to “create a more connected and rewarding future for fans around the world.” It’s certainly a more rewarding future, or at least it is for him.
3. Serena Williams
The tennis legend is more than just crypto-curious. At the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, she revealed that she considers bitcoin a “super strong investment” and her venture capital firm, Serena Ventures, has invested in a bitcoin rewards startup called Lolli, because she believes that “earning and owning bitcoin is a step towards financial inclusion for all people.”
4. Floyd Mayweather Jr.
A look back at the glorious madness of the 2017 coin offering. On Instagram, the legendary former boxer boldly announced to the world, “I’m going to earn a $hit t$n August 2 on the Stox.com ICO,” referring to an early prediction market project. The world was confused. What the hell is an ICO? What is he talking about? “Is it real?” wondered CoinDesk at the time. That post has since been deleted, but Mayweather would later shill several ICOs (including one that sparked a lawsuit), wore a t-shirt promoting “Ethereum Max” in June 2021, was proclaimed at a bitcoin conference and had a simple request to the world: “You can call me Floyd Crypto Mayweather.”
5. Jessica Pegula
Pegula, who is currently the seventh-ranked women’s tennis player in the world, became the first female athlete to drop an NFT collection in March 2021, telling the Tennis Channel that “it’s a really cool different kind of outlet for female athletes.” She noted that “sometimes you have to take some chances,” and hoped that she “inspired more athletes and more girls to do the same.”
6. Aaron Rodgers
“I believe in Bitcoin and the future is bright,” Rodgers tweeted. “That’s why I’m teaming up with Cash App to take part of my salary in bitcoin today.” Wearing a black suit and tie (in a John Wick Halloween costume), Rodgers sipped a glass of whiskey and said “Bitcoin to the moon” and announced that he and Cash App will be giving away $1 million worth of bitcoin so “we can go to the moon together.”
7. Spencer Dinwiddie
When he wasn’t dishing out pennies for the Dallas Mavericks, Dinwiddie co-founded the social token platform Calaxy (and raised $26 million). He has been publicly bullish on bitcoin since October 2018 (in a Bleacher Report profile, he described how he traded bitcoin on the phone before NBA practices). He appeared on Pomp’s podcast in 2020. He tried to get his National Basketball Association contract tokenized, and he even hosted “New Money” for CoinDesk TV. The man is foresight. In May 2021, he told me that his NBA colleagues are warming up to crypto, and that “everyone wants in.”
8. Megan Rapinoe
A long-time champion of inclusion and equality, the soccer player helped bring female athletes into the NFT market by launching “The Collective Series,” a spread of digital trading cards that also includes skateboarder Mariah Duran, fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad and the Women’s National Basketball Association icon Sue Bird. Rapinoe’s natural charisma is so strong that, as Jezebel’s Shannon Melero put it, she’s “tragically forced[es] fans like me are considering buying cryptocurrency.”
9. Russell Okung
It pays to be early. In May 2019, long before it became fashionable, Okung, then a player for the Los Angeles Chargers, tweeted a simple statement: “Pay me in bitcoin.” Crypto Twitter was ecstatic; “I see you!!!” the waterfall founder Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano, along with six fire emojis. Okung got his wish. Not only did he receive half of his NFL salary in bitcoin (the first NFL player to do so), he also helped launch the “Bitcoin Is” education campaign and even sparred with Tesla CEO Elon Musk over miners’ energy use, and paid for one billboard who said “Stick to the room, Elon.”
10. Steph Curry
In a commercial for FTX, Steph Curry, a guard on the Golden State Warriors, insists that he is not an expert on crypto. May be. But he was knowledgeable enough to take a stake in FTX. He dropped 3000 sneaker NFTs, he bought a Bored Ape (at one point worth 75 ETH), and he even made the monkey his Twitter avatar.
His teammates are also into crypto. Both Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala are partially paid in bitcoin, and the Warriors signed an NFT partnership with FTX. Perhaps most importantly, Curry wisely followed suit Brady’s advice: “Whatever you do…don’t laser eyes!”
Honorable mention – Dennis Rodman
Rodman has been out of the NBA for over two decades. But The Worm deserves credit for an incredible t-shirt he wore to Singapore, where he had hoped to help broker peace between then-US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un: “Peace Starts in Singapore – PotCoin.com “We agree that none of these words make any sense.
