NBA superstar Kevin Durant can’t find the password to his Coinbase account, which holds bitcoin that he began buying in earnest when he was playing for the Golden State Warriors in 2016. His agent couldn’t be happier.
Durant’s predicament has “only benefited” the hoopster, agent Rich Kleiman said.
“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,” Kleiman said Tuesday at CNBC’s Game Plan conference in Los Angeles.“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,” he said.
Durant, who will play for the Houston Rockets this upcoming season, began snapping up bitcoin around 2016, after the U.S. Olympic team legend and Kleiman attended a dinner where his then-teammates kept discussing the cryptocurrency.
“I just heard the word ‘bitcoin’ 25 times this evening, and the next day, we started investing in bitcoin,” Kleiman said. The agent did not say how much bitcoin Durant bought.
Bitcoin sold for between about $360 and $1,000 back in 2016, according to CoinGecko. The leading cryptocurrency is now trading at almost $116,000, or more than 11,000% above its highest price the year Durant was buying.
Durant has been unable to access his Coinbase account for “a few years” due to a “user error on our end,” Kleiman told CNBC on Wednesday.
“We’ve already been working directly with the Coinbase team on Kevin’s account recovery, which is why it was easy for me to make a joke about it on stage,” Kleiman said.
Kleiman said that he and Durant are also investors in Coinbase Global, and that the company “has been a valuable resource in growing our business.” In 2021, the duo’s Thirty Five Ventures struck a multi-year deal with Coinbase to promote the trading platform, which includes creating content about digital assets for Durant’s sports and entertainment website, Boardroom.
Coinbase, in a statement to CNBC, said its users can reset their passwords using self-service tools within the trading platform’s app. The platform for buying, selling and storing cryptocurrencies also has an around-the-clock support team fielding account recovery requests and other inquiries, according to a spokesman.