Kevin Durant Regains Access to Bitcoin Held in Coinbase Account

NBA mega star Kevin Durant has regained access to his Coinbase account, the crypto exchange giant confirmed to Decrypt via email on Thursday.

During a wider discussion of Durant’s business interests on Tuesday at CNBC’s Game Plan conference in Los Angeles, the player’s agent, Rich Kleiman, made light of his client’s inability to log into the account he opened nearly 10 years ago.

Since 2021, the 36-year-old Durant, who will play for the Houston Rockets this season, has had a deal with Coinbase to promote the brand.

He and Kleiman have also been investors in the company since 2017 through 35V, the investment fund they founded.

In a statement forwarded to Decrypt from Coinbase, Kleiman said that he and Durant had “been working directly with the Coinbase team on Kevin’s account recovery, which was why it was easy” for him “to make a joke about it on stage.”

“It was a user error on our end, and the process has been clear from the jump,” he said. “Our partnership spans nearly a decade, and Coinbase has been a valuable resource in growing our business.”

Durant purchased his first Bitcoin in late 2016, shortly after a birthday celebration hosted by Ben Horowitz, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, during which attendees made Bitcoin a central topic.

Durant had just joined the Golden State Warriors, where he would win an NBA championship the following spring. “The whole Warriors team came, and at the end of that night, I was like, ‘Kevin, I just heard the word Bitcoin 25 times this evening,’ and the next day, we started investing in Bitcoin,” Kleiman told the Game Plan audience.

But to laughter, Kleiman told the audience that Durant had been unable “to track down his Coinbase account info.”

“It’s just, it’s insane. It’s really, ‘oh, you, you really don’t have the password?’ We really don’t have it,” Kleiman said, although he added, “We’ll get it. There’s just a process we haven’t been able to figure out.”

Bitcoin was trading at about $600 when Durant made his first acquisitions. The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization was recently trading at about $117,100, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. Bitcoin is up more than 950% over the past five years.

Durant, the seventh leading scorer in NBA history, is among a widening array of high-profile professional athletes who have become Bitcoin investors and advocated for digital asset investments.

Among other NBA players, Cleveland Cavaliers center Tristan Thompson, who has hosted a crypto-focused podcast, unveiled a new Web3 project on Thursday—built on the Somnia Layer-1 platform—which aims to enhance basketball fans’ interactive experiences with the league.

And Charlotte Hornets’ Spencer Dinwiddie, who received his introduction to Bitcoin 12 years ago, attempted to tokenize his salary in 2019. The NBA later nixed the idea.

Decrypt has reached out to Boardroom, a sports, media, and entertainment company, and sibling to 35V.