Scottie Pippen is selling his NBA legacy again to become world cryptocurrency champion.
In his heyday, the Hall of Famer was happy to be the Robin to Michael Jordan’s Batman. But time, the Netflix documentary Last Dance and aggravated shame of his public divorce the ex girlfriend of Jordan’s oldest son, Marcus, seem to have so embittered him about playing a supporting role that he has apparently turned to contemplating whether the ’90s NBA dynasty needed other hero.
“How many championships would we have won with @ElonMusk? 🤔,” Pippen asked on The responses made users question Scottie Pippen’s mood and publishing Musk awkward stage jump at a Donald Trump campaign rally as evidence of the X owner’s lack of athletic ability. At last check, the post had more than 27 million views—the attention Pippen hoped to draw to his latest project: a new cryptocurrency which attempts to tokenize the basketball the Bulls used to beat the Lakers for the first of their six championships. “I think the Game 5 ball I have is very recognizable to a certain extent,” he said. he told TMZ Sports, “and what we’re trying to do is turn it into a real-world asset.”
You may have noticed: cryptocurrencies have taken American sports by storm. Stadiums, jerseys and teams are covered in logos for different currencies or exchanges, few more prominent than the Lakers’ home, Crypto.com Arena. Many fans use cryptocurrencies to place bets and buy special privileges with their favorite teams. Increasingly, athletes are also getting in on the action, promoting the industry as if it were just another shoe or just another sports drink. When Odell Beckham Jr signed with the Los Angeles Rams midway through the 2021 season and asked to receive his estimated base salary of $750,000 in cryptocurrency, the wide receiver was criticized for making little business sense and then came under fire when the market collapsed.
Or maybe Beckham knew what he was doing. Since the presidential election went in favor of Donald Trump, who went from calling cryptocurrencies “a scam” to promising to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet,” bitcoin’s valuation has skyrocketed to record levels. “Alright, who said taking my Rams salary in bitcoin was dumb again?” gloat Beckham, whose $750,000 would be worth more than $1.1 million now. “I think it’s the best thing I could do,” says Glauber Contessoto, a popular cryptocurrency speculator who goes by the name SlumDOGE Millionaire online. “He’s taking the money and investing it immediately instead of doing what a lot of these athletes do: waste it and go broke in a couple of years.”
Dallas Mavericks guard Spencer Dinwiddie went even further: he became itself in a digital asset. He took the $34 million contract he signed with the Brooklyn Nets in 2019 and turned it into a digital treasure bond. The idea was to raise $13.5 million from investors who had shelled out $150,000 in exchange for the promise of regular interest payments and special bonuses if he met certain contractual bonuses. But when the NBA ruined those plansBelieving they had gotten too close to the game, Dinwiddie limited himself to working with “accredited” investors (read: not Joe Fan) to sell just nine tokens, and with no exchange offering the limited supply for trading for the time being, the stock They are fundamentally useless.
Therein lies the big problem with cryptocurrencies: there are no obvious mechanisms for the average bettor to distinguish serious opportunities from scams. And it doesn’t help that leagues and athletes are equally likely to get caught. Two years ago, cryptocurrency exchange FTX had its name on the Miami Heat stadium and Major League Baseball umpires’ uniforms. Tom Brady also promoted the platform on a super bowl commercial as part of a crypto advertising blitz. “I’m not an expert and I don’t need to be,” says Steph Curry in your own FTX spot.
At least he was right about the first part. After being named a global ambassador for FTX, Curry launched more than 2,900 non-fungible tokens on the platform featuring digital replicas of the shoes he wore while breaking the NBA’s three-point scoring record and dedicated the proceeds to his nonprofit organization. Oakland-based profit. Not long after, FTX went bankrupt amid allegations that its owners embezzled and misused customer funds, including paying a combined $90 million for Brady and Curry for 40 hours of promotional work. according to FTX hagiographer Michael Lewis.
In March, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in the most notorious white-collar crime case since Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Brady and Curry, meanwhile, are Named in Class Action Lawsuit filed by FTX investors who accuse the couple, and other celebrities, of backing a multimillion-dollar flop.
The FTX collapse is one of the many reasons why Contessoto urges sports stars to think twice before associating their name with the latest crypto trend. “Nine times out of ten they are not very familiar with cryptocurrencies,” says Contessoto, whose story is told in the documentary 2023. This is not financial advice. In the film, Contessoto, a Brazilian immigrant looking to better himself after a hard job and a 220-square-foot apartment, bets his meager life savings on a joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. And after winning big on Doge, losing everything, and having to build back smarter, he’s not especially willing to risk his newfound reputation on memecoins, which are exactly what they sound like: cultural currency somehow made real. Sam Baker, a memecoin trader who also spoke to The Guardian, compares the memecoin rush to “buying a lottery ticket.”
It is a game of chance with exceptionally opaque rules that could be even more costly for genetic lottery winners with hard-earned reputations like Pippen, who underestimated his NBA talent before it peaked and spent much of the Bulls’ dynastic run have to play at a reduced price. (He should have bet on itself!) Most of the time, Contessoto acknowledges, “someone comes up to (these athletes) and says, ‘Hey, I’ll give you $100,000 if you do this or promote that.’ Then they toss the coin or whatever and it’s rugs and it just leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouths.”
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As an additional example, he points to Hailey Welch, aka the Hawk Tuah girl, who lent her viral fame to a memecoin and was duped. a classic pump and dump scam. And since it’s his face that appears in the hundred million dollar scam, the scammers can keep a low profile while Welch takes all the arrows. It’s enough to make you fear poor college athletes eager to trade on their fame.
But none of the risks inherent in cryptocurrencies seem to deter Pippen. This despite receiving similar backlash for promoting failed NFTs and struggling to create a market for this new currency, which, again, is based on a ball that no one has thought about in over 30 years. “I think that dance was the start of a dynasty,” Pippen told TMZ. “This dance was something very meaningful to me. “Even the moment I grabbed it, I knew it was going to be the start of something special.”
At a crypto conference in New York in October, Pippen expressed his desire to “build a community” around the ball and turn it into a documentary and digital game. Michael Saylor, a crypto evangelist who notably denounced Covid safety measures for employees at his Virginia-based tech company as “soul theft,” is one of Pippen’s biggest cheerleaders.
Pippen ignored reactions to his Musk post (“I’m following my favorite comments,” he wrote) before showing another AI image of him and Jordan taking on a pair of Tesla robots with a basketball with the symbol your currency. “I feel like Scottie’s heart is in the right place,” Contessoto says. “I’m sure you have a lot of people around you who claim to have knowledge of cryptography. But these guys don’t really care if the project works well or not.”
That is to say: the great Bulls could not be a more perfect champion for the sports campaign of the great cryptocurrencies, a new fresh and free era that has sellers like Pippen well prepared to reach all brands.