Shaquille O’Neal joins the NFT craze with huge crypto buys

Los Angeles Lakers legend Shaquille O’Neal is the latest NBA star to jump on the NFT bandwagon as the Hall of Famer buys in on two huge projects. Shaq, who’s made a name for himself as one of the more successful athlete-entrepreneurs, purchased a few big NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens to start his digital portfolio with a bang.

The Lakers icon casually dropped 6.5 Ethereum (which is roughly around $20,000 in value as of writing) on a new NFT project called Creature World and bought two unique assets. Shaq even went as far as using one of his Creatures as his profile photo on his Twitter account and even added the serial number of that NFT to his Twitter description:

On Wednesday night, the four-time NBA champ went full ‘degen mode’ and even hopped on Creature World’s Discord server to hang out with the 20,000-strong community (via Creature NFT’s own Danny Cole):

i think i gotta wake up pic.twitter.com/CPstbzvKcn

— danny cole (@dannycoleee) September 29, 2021

Aside from spending a ton of ETH in Creature World, Shaq also aped in and bought a Mutant Ape Yacht Club NFT – a new project from the very popular NFT brand called Bored Ape Yacht Club which has already attracted huge names like Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors.

The NFT boom has completely taken over the digital world over the past few months. For context, BAYC and MAYC have amassed a total of $800 million since their inception while the newer Creature World has accumulated a total of $65 million in just one month of existence (via CryptoSlam).

Other sports-related NFT projects like NBA Top Shot have also made their mark and soon, other major sports leagues, brands, and personalities will continue to enter the metaverse. Mass adoption has definitely begun and you might want to hop on this whole rocket before it heads to the moon.