Basketball star Kevin Durant is in a curious predicament, he has lost the password to his Coinbase account, which holds all of the bitcoin he began purchasing when he played for the Golden State Warriors in 2016.
But there is good news. Durant’s agent, Rich Kleiman, addressed the situation on Sept. 16 at CNBC’s Game Plan conference in Los Angeles.
“We’ve yet to be able to track down his Coinbase account info, so
we’ve never sold anything, and this bitcoin is just through the roof. It’s just a process we haven’t been able to figure out, but Bitcoin keeps going up…so, I mean, it’s only benefited us.”Durant has never sold any of the holdings and bitcoin’s value has skyrocketed. The Houston Rocket star’s inability to unlock the account is due to a “user error,” Kleinman said.
According to Kleiman, the genesis of Durant’s foray into cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin, was a team dinner hosted by his then-Golden State Warriors teammates who mentioned bitcoin repeatedly.
The next day, Durant and his agent started investing in Bitcoin. At the time, it traded at a price between $360 and $1,000, but presently, it’s trading at $116,000, which represents a staggering 11,000% increase.
According to a 2021 op-ed in The New York Times by Cornell University Professor and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Eswar Prasad, Durant seems to have gotten lucky
, given cryptocurrency’s relatively volatile nature.Also, according to a 2022 article by The Atlantic, which profiled Black investors who lost substantial investments, the success story of Durant is an anomaly. As staff writer Annie Lowrey noted, these investors were driven by the failures of more traditional financial holdings as it regards the fortunes of Black Americans.
“As of 2021, Black Americans were more likely than their white counterparts to
own crypto. They were also more likely to own crypto than stocks or mutual funds, according to one study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. Then the crypto market fell apart,” Lowrey noted.RELATED CONTENT: Shaquille O’Neal Settles FTX Lawsuit For $1.8M