When Spencer Dinwiddie was drafted into the National Basketball Association in 2014, he says the players’ locker room conversations were typically on the breezier side. “Maybe it was girls, cars, and stuff eight years ago,” he says on a Zoom call. But about five years ago, as players became more financially savvy, that started to change; suddenly people were giving tips on their stock portfolios and chatting about VC funds.

This past season, things evolved even further. “Now it’s Bored Apes, NFTs, and digital assets,” Dinwiddie says.

Dinwiddie’s observations are spot on: Indeed, Web3 projects have penetrated the league’s culture to a degree that remains unmatched in professional sports. Dinwiddie himself has pursued several such initiatives, including an attempt to turn his own NBA contract into a tokenized digital asset. More recently, he cofounded Calaxy—that’s a portmanteau for “creator’s galaxy”—an open-source platform that allows influencers and entertainers to monetize their work, likeness, and brand using blockchain-powered social tokens.