Dinnwiddie Expands Crypto Ties With Bison Trails Deal
Spencer Dinwiddie is not only a prolific point guard for the Brooklyn Nets, he’s also one of the first high-profile U.S. professional athletes to invest heavily in cryptocurrency.
When Dinwiddie signed a three-year, $34 million deal with Brooklyn in 2019, he offered that contract as an investment vehicle to monetize much of it ahead of its maturation date at the end of the 2021-22 season.
Through his own company, Calaxy, Dinwiddie has entered a partnership with Bison Trails, a budding New York-based blockchain enterprise, the latter announced Thursday. Dinwiddie’s goal is to draw investors toward crypto purchases on his chosen networks, Polkadot and Flow, which Bison Trails supports. Dinwiddie was also an investor in developer Dapper Labs’s latest $12 million funding round.
“We’re excited to work with Spencer Dinwiddie and Calaxy,” said Joe Lallouz, the chief executive of Bison Trails. “As an innovative thinker in the crypto space, and a prominent professional athlete, Spencer Dinwiddie’s participation on Flow and Polkadot will help move the ecosystem forward by introducing more people to crypto. We look forward to seeing how our work together will help grow the Flow and Polkadot communities.”
Dinwiddie is Bison Trails’ first celebrity client, and the company hopes he will pave the way for others. Bison Trails provides blockchain infrastructure for protocols like Polkadot and Flow. Investors purchase what are called tokens through third-party token exchanges. Bison Trails provides the infrastructure and nodes, which connect with the networks, and earns a fee from Calaxy to run those nodes for its customers.
When a customer puts digital assets into a chosen network, that customer can earn rewards at a rate that each network designates as an economic incentive to participate in the network. Bison Trails also earns a percentage of those rewards.
“As Calaxy becomes the social engagement application of the future, it is business-critical for us to work with innovative and credible partners like Bison Trails who will support the backend infrastructure and drive participation with the utmost security,” Dinwiddie said. “The growth within the industry has presented a tremendous opportunity for a lot of emerging blockchain-powered companies. The benefits of delegating to Calaxy nodes will further enhance the industry and continue to foster a collaborative environment as a whole.”
Dinwiddie plays for a talented Nets squad that expects to boast a healthy Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving for the shortened 2020-21 NBA season. He averaged 20.6 points and 6.8 assists per game in 64 games this past season, which was paused on March 11 when the coronavirus began spreading across the U.S. and Canada.
The Nets are slated to open their season this coming Tuesday against the Golden State Warriors at Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn.
Bison Trails, a privately held company with an unpublished value, was founded in 2018 and raised an initial Series A capital of $25.5 million in November 2019.
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