With NFL legend Tom Brady officially announcing his retirement from football after 22 seasons, the next field Brady looks to conquer could be on the blockchain.
Brady co-founded Autograph last year, an NFT agency that recently closed a $170 million Series B funding round led by venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins.
Autograph acts essentially a go-between for celebrities, athletes and entertainers and non-fungible token collections.
Brady's company has put together an All-Star board that includes himself; Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services; Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX and singer The Weeknd. Featured athletes on the platform include Tiger Woods, Derek Jeter, Wayne Gretzky, Tony Hawk and Naomi Osaka.
Autograph agreed to an exclusive deal with sports betting platform DraftKings in July 2021 allowing users to buy, sell and trade digital sports collectibles on the DraftKings Marketplace, which also has an exclusive distribution on Autograph's sports products.
Brady Is Also Into Crypto
Brady and wife Gisele Bündchen took an equity stake in crypto firm FTX Trading last June to serve as brand ambassadors for the exchange.
The company has already become one of the world's largest crypto exchanges after debuting just two years.
This week, FTX, led by billionaire Bankman-Fried, raised another $400 million in its third funding round, boosting its valuation to $32 billion. Investors in the round included Singapore state holding company Temasak, cryptocurrency venture capital firm Paradigm, the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board and venture capital firm NEA.
Last week, the company's U.S. sister exchange, FTX U.S., also raised $400 million from the same investors at a valuation of $8 billion.
All told, FTX has raised about $1.8 billion since July when it was valued at $18 billion.
Bankman-Fried told CNBC Monday that FTX has been discussing a potential public offering.
Brady the Crypto Evangelist
The future NFL Hall of Famer, who has 11 million followers on Instagram and more than 2 million on Twitter, has used his social media platform to push crypto in the past.
“This isn’t the first time that they’ve been involved in crypto, not the first time they’ve thought about it or even used it, which I think makes it a much more natural and authentic partnership,” Bankman-Fried told Bloomberg of Brady and Bündchen. “They’re examples of audiences we’d really like FTX to be the product for.”
