Does anyone remember NFTs? The fall of “non fungible tokens” was as fast as its rise. But for a brief time period, it seemed like everyone was selling these digital… things… for huge prices. Various celebrities, athletes, and sports teams got involved in the craze, which is now leading to some serious headaches. And that includes Hall of Fame NBA star and current TNT analyst Shaquille O’Neal.
O’Neal has already been at the center of crypto-related controversy before as last year he tried to avoid being served in a lawsuit related to the failed FTX. The hijinx of O’Neal being followed around the country avoiding his legal papers sounded like a modern day Smoky and the Bandit.
And now Shaq is in court related to his promotion of the NFT Astrals project that he was involved in. And this one is moving ahead after a judge ruled that O’Neal would have to face the accusations about him pumping up the tokens and then seeing the market collapse.
Via CoinDesk:
A U.S. court has granted one part and dismissed another part of a class action lawsuit against legendary basketball player Shaquille O’Neal for his role in the NFT project Astrals, according to court documents filed on Friday.
Astrals was a project involving a collection of 10,000 non-fungible tokens (NFTs) 3D avatars and a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for “incubating innovative projects.” Astral NFTs could be used as virtual avatars and the Galaxy token was the governance token of the DAO.
The case alleged that O’Neal acted as the face of Astrals urging investors to “[h]op on the wave before its too late.” Even when cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed in November 2022, O’Neal sent out a graphics interchange format (GIF) on the community message board Discord, from The Wolf of Wall Street that read, “I’m not F***ing Leaving,” the court document said. The lawsuit alleged that O’Neal fled the project after that and “the value of Astrals financial products plummeted.”
O’Neal was not found by the court to be a “control person” of the enterprise. However, he will have to stand up to being a “seller” of the NFTs for actively encouraging people to buy into them.
You have to feel sorry for anyone that got caught up in a wave of hysteria that amounted to people paying upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars for goofy smoking monkey pictures that anyone could screenshot and put as their screen saver, or whatever these astrals were.
While this lawsuit may be something a lot of folks will scoff at, it could have serious implications for the NFT and crypto markets. If Shaquille O’Neal is found liable in any way for promoting NFTs that are found to be unregulated securities, he may not be the last celebrity figure to find themselves in legal drama that extends well beyond the time that the hype train flew off the tracks.
[CoinDesk]