By Mat Di Salvo
2 min read
NFT ownership in Ice Cube's BIG3 basketball league collection is being snapped up fast.
Ice Cube announced on Saturday that the 25 Fire-Tier NFTs for his BIG3 team Tri State were bought by a group led by tech entrepreneurs Sunny Deep, Vinny Lingham, and Kevin Rose. Moonbirds, Rose’s NFT collection of 10,000 pixelated owls, will be the community sponsor behind the purchase, Ice Cube said.
Also this weekend, Snoop Dogg teamed up with PayPal co-founder Ken Howery to buy all 25 Fire-Tier editions of the BIG3 team Bivouac.
It doesn’t stop there—on Friday entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk also got involved, buying 25 Fire-Tier editions of the 2019 championship-winning Triplets.
So what’s all the fuss about? Ice Cube launched BIG3 league in 2017, and it’s very different from the NBA: Teams aren’t tied to cities, and games are 3-on-3, not 5-on-5. It does feature former NBA players such as Rashard Lewis and Amar'e Stoudemire.
But NFT fanatic Ice Cube didn’t want to stop there. Last month he announced he was using Ethereum to fractionalize ownership of the league’s franchises.
It works like this: The league has 12 teams. And people can own parts of the teams by investing in NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
Each team has 1,000 total NFTs split between two tiers: 25 "Fire" NFTs at $25,000 apiece, and 975 "Gold" NFTs at $5,000.
When a person—or organization—gains ownership via the NFTs (i.e, owns the majority of the NFTs) they’re able to make team decisions, choose its CEO or president, and do things like create team merchandise and interact with league officials.
Ken Howery said in a Friday statement that "the league’s embrace of NFTs as ownership rights is both visionary and practical; key features of every smart investment."
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