Why Brooklyn Nets Star Spencer Dinwiddie Co-Founded a Crypto Startup

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:17)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:19)

So Tracy, you know, we've been talking a lot about crypto, cryptocurrencies on the show lately.

Tracy Alloway (0:26)

Yes.

Joe Weisenthal (0:27)

But in kind of like a sort of very limited abstract sense. And I think actually people are getting excited about different things that could be done with coins and tokenization, et cetera, in a lot more ways than just sort of like the redefining money or redefining finance concept.

Tracy Alloway (0:45)

Yeah, I'm definitely starting to see quite a lot of more creative use cases. So there was a Barclays note the other day that basically talked about using tokenization to fix the repo market and try to make the settlement times more efficient.

So that's fun. But we've seen lots of different potential applications or tokens, including maybe tokenizing future future income streams from individuals.

Joe Weisenthal (1:11)

Yeah, tokenizing athletes. And this is also like, you've always been obsessed with this topic. And we actually talked about it recently with music rights. And I think years ago, we talked about Bowie bonds. This is the idea of owning the stream to a person's income or being able to invest in a person or a star has always been something that appeals to you, right?

Tracy Alloway (1:33)

Appeals to me, I think intellectually, yes.

I think there are a lot of open questions about how exactly it works and whether or not it's good for society. But I think it's sort of anyone who's into or interested in securitization is at some point going to start thinking about whether or not you can apply the process to people and individual streams of income. I think Matt Levine once described this, our Bloomberg columnist colleague once described this as like the classic sort of college late night dorm intellectual exercise. Business model. Yeah, well, no, like the kind of thing you talk about maybe after you've had a few drinks or something else, can you actually sell stock in people and how would you do it?

Joe Weisenthal (2:19)

Tracy, this is so much more than dorm room talk now. This is becoming big stuff. One other thing, we're talking about the idea of like betting on a person or buying a sort of a steak in someone that you're really into, but did you pay attention to the whole NBA top shot phenomenon a few months ago?

Tracy Alloway (2:40)

No, and this is going to be an episode that comes with my standard sporting caveat, which is I have no idea what's going on in the NBA. I'm not an expert in the space by any stretch of the imagination. So go ahead and tell me what happened.

Joe Weisenthal (2:55)

Well, your excuse is also that you're in Hong Kong, but a few months ago, there was this huge obsession with these digital sort of blockchain-based basketball cards and people were paying tens of thousands of dollars for essentially a playing card, like a star dunking or something like that. It was like a video, kind of looked like a GIF, but collectible, one-of-a-kind kind of things. It was this huge thing.

It's kind of faded a little bit in the public's imagination, but as a proof of concept, people were just really excited about the idea of using tokenization, digital collectibles, all kinds of new ways for fans to express their support.

Tracy Alloway (3:34)

Right. Well, if you think about...

We've spoken a little bit about NFTs on the show. You think about NFTs, there's a sort of natural application to sports collectibles, which have always been... I mean, sporting fans have always been interested in collecting things surrounding sports, right? Baseball cards, kind of friendly spring to mind.

Joe Weisenthal (3:56)

Exactly right. Well, I am very excited about our guest because we have an NBA star on the podcast today.

He is the co-founder of the app, Calaxy. He is a star player for the Brooklyn Nets.

We are going to be speaking with Spencer Dinwiddie, as well as Solo Ceesay, also the co-founder. And they are working on projects related to all this, blockchain, interacting with stars, tokenization, new ways for fans to interact with the game. So I'm very excited about speaking to both Spencer and Solo. So thank you both for coming on.

Solo Ceesay (4:36)

Yeah, thank you.

Joe Weisenthal (4:37)

So Spencer, I mean, actually Spencer, I'm sort of like familiar. You've always been into like crypto stuff, or I know like a lot of athletes are getting into it a long time ago, but I feel like you've actually been way ahead of the curve on this stuff, like thinking about blockchain and cryptocurrencies. What got you interested in this world?