Dreams of Satoshi, insane AI artwork, endless crypto bull-posting: What exactly is going on with basketball legend Scottie Pippen?
The seven-time NBA All-Star and two-time Olympic gold medalist has steadily taken over the Crypto Twitter timeline in recent months, with a bizarre and beautiful array of statements and images pertaining to the crypto industry.
Things seem to have taken off last summer, when Pippen launched a crypto project aimed at tokenizing a basketball, from a pivotal point in his career, as a real-world asset. The “Game 5 Ball,” which was played by Pippen and Chicago Bulls during their 1991 NBA Finals triumph over the then-dominant Los Angeles Lakers, took on new life last year first as a crypto token, then as a “trash-talking AI sports agent.”
Sure, star athletes transition to crypto every now and then. But Pippen soon took things to the next level.
Around the same time, the retired NBA legend began posting hypnotic AI-created images accompanied by provocative claims about Bitcoin and his relationship to the crypto asset. One such illustration, which shows Pippen in a prayer-like pose on a basketball court receiving a visit from a hulking, masked man in a “Satoshi” sweatshirt, accompanied a declaration that Bitcoin’s mysterious creator was communicating with Pippen via his subconscious.
“I had a dream I met Satoshi Nakamoto last night,” Pippen wrote, referring to Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator. “He didn’t see me as another player. Instead, Satoshi was proud that I was opening a new lane for RWA in the crypto market.”
The visions got more provocative from there.
In November, appearing onstage with Bitcoin bull Michael Saylor at a crypto conference in Miami, Pippen asserted he met Satoshi back in 1993—a full 15 years before Nakamoto first appeared online.
Saylor’s incredulous, real-time reaction to the claim immediately went viral.
Things then got even more mysterious when Pippen clarified that Satoshi was not actually a human being, in his estimation, but instead “an idea” and “a legacy” that began forming during the same period as the Chicago Bulls’ legendary streak of the 1990s.
In the new year, as crypto markets have surged, Pippen has only doubled down on his unique form of bull-posting. In fact, he seems to have particularly latched onto the connectivity between the Chicago Bulls and the notion of crypto bull-posting.
Another recent entry saw a muscle-bound Pippen with multiple hands (perhaps unintentional), grasping for a floating Bitcoin token as tens of anonymous fingers aimed to take away his treasured prize.
In recent days, the star athlete has moved beyond Bitcoin and his own likeness, into the uncharted waters of the broader crypto ecosystem. An image posted to his X account on Thursday appeared to depict Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin menacingly smoking a cigarette in front of a corporate office building with a giant Solana logo, an Ethereum competitor.
Some questioned whether Pippen had accidentally mislabeled the building in the image’s background. But true Pippenheads quickly pushed back, arguing that the basketball star has moved on to a new stage of expression and subtext in his fantastically unique crypto oeuvre.
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