Basketball star turned digital racehorse tycoon: Wilson Chandler on NFTs and also the NBA

By Clark

A journey that started with commerce shitcoins has recently become a growing passion for NFTs — a part of a wider wave of NBA players and cultural tastemakers taking up the blockchain area.

As Wilson Chandler tells it, despite being a NBA star with a decade-plus professional career and nearly $80 million in career earnings, the 6’8 band forward still got his begin in blockchain in an equivalent manner innumerable enthusiasts do: commerce shitcoins.

Chandler told Cointelegraph that he 1st detected crypto from some “kids” he vie Fortnite with in 2017. once growing fascinated by their stories of turning paltry sums into legitimate holdings, he eventually invited one dead man to his Chicago home for a crash-course on putting in wallets and exploitation exchanges.

From there, the record is all on-chain: per a glance at his Etherscan address, his early investment strategy was very little over spray-and-pray.

“From there I bought coins — Bitcoin, ETH, Stellar — a bunch of shit simply kidding, learning. Lost a bunch of coins doing silly stuff like pump and dump corporations, not knowing any higher.”

Like several degens-in-development, he relied on a network of friends for info. As he recounted on a recent episode of NFT collector podcast Club prime Shot, he had one spirited friend speak him into a stratagem based mostly out of Dutch capital — a scam that priced him a big Bitcoin position. The friend? The late, legendary rapper and activist Nipsey Hussle.

“I have confidence in that shit all the time,” he said, laughing.

However, he told Cointelegraph that those early stumbles have currently made-up a path to what may possibly find himself being a second act for the previous star.

“Experience is the best teacher they say.”