After launching her own token in May, media personality Caitlyn Jenner is set to debut a new crypto project around the Olympic gold medal she won 48 years ago.
Set for Thursday, the launch will offer investors a chance to own a digital piece of Jenner’s 1976 Olympic gold medal via fractionalization. Jenner told Decrypt that she got the idea before this year’s Summer Olympics and wanted to approach it creatively with her team.
“Well, I have been in this space for almost a year now, and I'm constantly looking at new ways that I can help improve this space,” she said. “And here we have a real-world asset that is part of the Olympics and part of history.”
Jenner recalled the euphoric feeling of winning the Olympic decathlon as Bruce Jenner, before her transition to Caitlyn in 2015.
“It was my last meet. I knew I was retiring after that was over with, because I had to give up too much to be there. And it was just an absolute feeling of satisfaction,” she said. “It just put a smile on my face. I climbed every mountain, I overcame every obstacle, and I was able to take on the world. And I won, physically took on the world. It was a very powerful feeling.”
That gold medal will be represented by an NFT (ERC-721) on Ethereum layer-2 network Base, which is stored in a secure token vault and fractionalized into a tradable ERC-20 token called MEDAL with a supply of 100,000,000. According to Jenner's team, the ERC-721 smart contract "maps to the provable metadata of the legally binding contract signed by Caitlyn Jenner showing ownership of the real Olympic gold medal," which is stored on IPFS.
The rollout will be a “fair launch,” Jenner said, with the official website currently counting down to Thursday.
“There's no starting price,” Jenner told Decrypt. “We’re just gonna put it out there and see what happens, and let the market decide.”
While the token is inspired by the gold medal, ownership of MEDAL conveys no rights to the physical item, which is held by Jenner. “The 1976 Medal tokens represent a fractional share in the value of the 1976 Gold Olympics medal and not physical ownership of the medal,” the project’s website notes.
Jenner pointed to the challenges facing the crypto industry, including government scrutiny and the economic downturn, as inspiration for launching the project. She believes that the gold medal project offers an opportunity to bring positive attention to the space.
“There's never been an NFT of a gold medal digitally put out there for you to get involved with,” Jenner said. “It’s part of history.”
Jenner made her first foray into the crypto industry in May with the launch of her JENNER coin on Solana and later Ethereum, helping to kickstart this summer’s celebrity meme coin trend. She said that the gold medal NFT project will involve JENNER token holders in some respect, but wouldn’t get into details about it.
“We are not going to let down all the JENNER coin holders whatsoever. The general people are going to hear a lot about it on Thursday,” she said. “We're not leaving the JENNER coin people behind. I want everybody to be a winner when it comes to crypto, and especially involved with my coins and what I'm doing.”
Jenner pointed to her coin—which like many celebrity coins is down sharply since its early summer peak—as a way for traders to “diversify” their holdings, and said she’s sticking around the crypto world even amid turmoil in the markets.
“I just want to help people out,” she said. “I just want everybody to do well.”
On that note, Jenner also said that she will be speaking at the next Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas in 2025, following last month’s event in Nashville that featured Donald Trump.
“I'm very excited. I have been in the speaking business pretty much all my life,” she said. “I want people to know that I'm in [crypto] for the long run.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication to include additional detail on the tokenization of the Olympic gold medal and the smart contracts powering the NFT and related token.