Iconic rapper Ice Cube — also known as O’Shea Jackson Sr. — has jumped on the Dogecoin (DOGE) bandwagon with his endorsement of an “incredible and historical” DOGE transaction.
Cube’s entry into the wild world of Dogecoin is related to the BIG3 basketball league that he co-founded. The organization predominantly features former NBA stars in a three-on-three format as opposed to the regular five-on-five basketball games.
Last month, the BIG3 launched a new ownership model for the league, which consists of selling tokenized stakes in each of the 12 teams. There are 1000 nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in total allocated to each team, with 25 “Fire” NFTs worth $25,000 a pop and 975 “Gold” NFTs at $5,000 each.
On Wednesday, MyDoge wallet co-founder Bill Lee tweeted at Ice Cube saying “if ya dig DOGE, me and the DogeArmy will take one as well,” in reference to a previous post from Ice Cube announcing that Snoop Dogg was buying two teams.
Ice Cube then replied with “come on wit it Bill, you know i’m down with the DogeArmy.”
Come on wit it Bill, you know I’m down with the #DogeArmy https://t.co/d9C1TzS4ff
— Ice Cube (@icecube) May 4, 2022
While it is unclear how “down” with the DogeArmy Ice Cube actually is, the BIG3 promptly fired out a press release on the same day announcing that Lee had purchased all 25 Fire NFTs for the “Aliens” team via DOGE.
The “incredible and historical” transaction, as described by Ice Cube, was worth $625,000, or roughly 4.86 million DOGE at the time of writing, with the BIG3 also calling it the “largest commercial transaction in history” of DOGE.
Related: Tumbleweeds blow through Coinbase NFT on its first day: Just $75K in volume
The Fire NFTs represent the higher end of ownership and utility benefits, such as game management, voting rights and intellectual property/licensing rights for team logos, names and merchandise. Notably, if the owner/hodler was to sell their Fire NFTs, they’d also get a 40% cut of the sale.
Incredible and historical https://t.co/ouulpk0xdd
— Ice Cube (@icecube) May 4, 2022
As part of the announcement, Lee took a slight dig at NFT projects featuring apes and owls, suggesting that he only looks at NFT projects with utility. This is, of course, despite the fact that some ape and owl projects have built utility for hodlers and is pretty lofty rhetoric for a man primarily working on developing wallets for a memecoin that was created as a joke.
“While others are buying NFT images of apes and owls, I believe that NFTs with utility are the next frontier. It is a dream to own a basketball team and the BIG3 is shifting the NFT game by offering ownership rights such as licensing/IP, team voting/management, and merchandising.”
