Kevin Durant has been making business moves all year round, and his latest venture marks a new milestone.
According to Adweek, Durant and his manager Rich Kleiman recently inked a two-year partnership with blockchain platform Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot. Their multimedia platform Boardroom will feature Dapper Labs’ NFT marketplace for NBA Top Shot — making Durant the first player to back NBA Top Shot.
As previously reported by AfroTech, Boardroom — which relaunched in 2021 — is backed by Kevin Durant and Kleiman’s investment firm Thirty Five Ventures. The platform’s coverage for NBA Top Shot will include news and feature stories, giveaways, spotlights around key moments, fan-to-fan trading and behind-the-scenes video content, Adweek reports.
“Through NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs has proven that they can provide not just value but community with basketball fans, and they were able to build trust with fans very early on in the crypto space,” Durant said in a statement to Adweek. “Still, they’ve barely just scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible, and we think we’re going to be able to use our Boardroom platform to really highlight what’s new and next for them.”
While creating community for NBA fans, Durant and Kleiman also plan for the partnership to play a role in elevating NBA Top Shot’s content for Durant’s Brooklyn Nets team, as well as further intertwine both his passions of basketball and tech.
“For Kevin, extending the game of basketball in any way shape or form is exciting to him,” Kleiman told Adweek. “Being that the two of us have been around this world now since 2016 and are pretty well educated on it, to be able to combine his love of basketball in the NBA with being in innovative space the NFT space is very much what we set out to do when we created Boardroom. To see it come to fruition is pretty exciting.”
