Two-time NBA champion and three-time Olympic gold medalist Kevin Durant is co-founding a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) to invest in various sectors, including crypto firms.
The SPAC, known as Infinite Acquisition Corp, is a 50-50 partnership between Durant’s Thirty Five Ventures and American banking firm LionTree.
Co-owned by Durant and businessman Rich Kleiman, Thirty Five Ventures is a venture capital firm with investments in over 75 companies spanning various markets, including cryptocurrencies.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Infinite Acquisition says it is targeting to raise up to $230 million.
Infinite Acquisition’s “thematic areas of focus” include crypto and digital assets, according to the filing.
The filing singles out cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Kraken and other crypto firms saying that the platforms and technologies they have developed make the internet “ownable.”
“The recent acceleration of crypto and digital assets as frictionless tools for the consumer continues to gain tremendous momentum with the rise of platforms like Coinbase, Kraken, Chainalysis, BlockChain.com and BlockFi or security solutions for crypto assets, such as hardware wallet technologies developed by Ledger.
These technologies make the internet ownable, providing new ways to reward and compensate creators for their work allowing unbound creativity, and driving toward the emergence of potentially massive new platforms to harness this democratization of scarcity.”
The NBA superstar was an early investor in Coinbase through Thirty Five Ventures. The firm invested an undisclosed amount in Coinbase in 2017 in Series D funding. Coinbase’s shares during the Series D fundraising were priced at $8.25.
The shares of the crypto exchange debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange earlier this year at $250. Coinbase’s shares closed Thursday at $344.
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