Sacramento Kings Star De’Aaron Fox Ditches Ditches NFT Project—After Pocketing $1.5 Million

In a series of restricted tweets today, NBA player De’Aaron Fox announced that his NFT collection, “Swipa The Fox” would be disbanded effective immediately—taking with it 475 user ETH, worth about $1.5 million at the time of the projects minting.

According to the tweets, the project, which went live January 15 of this year, was “ill timed” due to it unexpectedly coinciding with the middle of the NBA season. According to an announcement by De’Aaron in the Swipa the Fox Discord server (which hosts 106k members), “The time and attention that y’all deserve and that I wanted to give you all/what this project requires, was not known to me and I overstepped and stretched myself too thin.”

The “high utility NFT collection” was one of the more ambitious and highly reported sports NFT projects, which in addition to 3D “Fox” avatars, promised opportunities to win all-star game tickets, a metaverse basketball court, and even a scholarship for one student to Fox’s alma matter, the University of Kentucky.

Fox offered to make up for the project’s abandonment in the Discord server, offering “All Rookies” members (those who had purchased between 5 and 9 NFTs) a signed jersey, currently valued on eBay at between $75 and $145 dollars. De’Aaron also promised to “reward” MVP’s (those who had purchased at least 20 NFTs), though it’s unclear yet what the material of this reward will be.

While Fox ostensibly appears to be apologetic, it’s clear the 3,000 Fox holders are still quite upset by the lack of explanation around the project’s demise—and more importantly—where their crypto has gone.

“Never sold a fox, cause I trusted the team ??‍♂️” tweeted one Fox holder.

“Same man 014 ETH @swipathefox give us our money back” replied another.

While a followup to Fox’s tweet says that the “project will be updated at the conclusion of the season”, an announcement by the Discord admin AlbanianMarauder confirms that “this project is pretty much done now.” All social media accounts for the project have been deleted, and the swipathefox.io domain no longer active.

The floor price of Swipa the Fox NFTs sits at .003 ETH, or roughly $7.86 as of publication date. The average price over the last 90 days is .086 ETH. indicating a a 96.5% loss in value.