Kevin Durant has finally got his bitcoin back.
The basketball star invested in the cryptocurrency nearly a decade ago — but hasn’t been able to touch the precious tokens until this week, his agent told Business Insider.
Durant and Rich Kleiman, his longtime agent and business partner, told the story of how they lost access to the crypto wallet on Tuesday.
Kleiman recalled that soon after Durant signed with the Golden State Warriors in 2016, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz hosted a birthday dinner for the athlete the whole team attended.
“At the end of that night, I was like, Kevin, I just heard the word ‘bitcoin’ 25 times this evening,” Kleiman said at CNBC and Boardroom’s Game Plan event. “And the next day we started investing.”
Kleiman — who partnered with Durant to found Boardroom, a media network, and the player’s family office, Thirty Five Ventures— said the pair lost access to his crypto wallet.
“We’ve yet to be able to track down his Coinbase account info, so we’ve never sold anything, and his bitcoin is just through the roof,” Kleiman said.
Now, a representative for Kleiman has told Business Insider they had “access” to the Coinbase account but did not comment on its contents. A Coinbase source with knowledge of the matter said that Durant was able to access his account on Wednesday.
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Bitcoin was priced below $650 on September 29, 2016 — Durant’s birthday. It has soared roughly 180-fold since to trade at record highs of around $117,000. If Durant invested $10,000, he would have pocketed around 15 bitcoins, together worth more than $1.8 million today.
At the Tuesday event, Kleiman joked that it was “actually insane” they couldn’t regain access, given that 35V invested in Coinbase early and partnered with it, making Durant a promoter of the crypto exchange.
“We’ll get it,” Kleiman said about the missing login info. “It’s just a process we haven’t been able to figure out, but bitcoin keeps going up so it’s like, what’s the problem. I mean, it’s only benefited us.”
He quipped that it had “been a few years” of trying to get back into the account.
Speaking on Wednesday, before they had regained access, Kleiman told Business Insider the loss of account access was “a user error on our end and the process has been clear from the jump.”
“Our partnership spans nearly a decade and Coinbase has been a valuable resource in growing our business,” he said.
A Coinbase spokesperson said earlier on Wednesday: “If a customer has lost their password they can reset it using our self services tools within the app, and our support team is available 24/7 to guide users through this process.”
