NBA legend Scottie Pippen needs no introduction to the world of Basketball. The former Chicago Bulls star hung his jersey on the exit door of the NBA back in 2004 after an illustrious 17-year-long basketball career that boasts about one of the best on-court performances of his life.
Post Basketball, Scottie Pippen has shown interest in Bitcoin and has openly spoken about the benefits of owning the particular digital currency.

Scottie Pippen Gives NBA Stars Kobe Bryant and Wilt Chamberlain’s Reference In A Recent Bitcoin Promo

When it comes to talking about Crypto, Olympic gold medalist Scottie Pippen leaves no chance. The 59-year-old professional basketball star Pippen diverted the attention of the netizens after he went on to talk about NBA icons Kobe Bryant and Hall Of Famer Wilt Chamberlain in his recent promo with respect to Cryptocurrency.
Scottie Pippen posted a sleeping image of himself on X and captioned it as
“Just took a nap and Satoshi whispered ‘Bitcoin will go closer to Black Mamba numbers before it goes back to Chamberlain,’”

However, it is still unclear what numbers Pippen was talking about in his post. Wilt Chamberlain holds the record of single-game scoring as back in 1962, he had secured a century under his name. This particular achievement of the seven-time NBA champion is still one of the biggest records of all time. No basketball athlete has surpassed him as of now.
Bryant holds the record for scoring 81 points in 2006 against the Raptors and created a storm in the NBA world. From Pippen’s reference, it could be understood that maybe he is indicating towards the Bitcoin value in the near future.

Scottie Pippen Makes Big Claims About Bitcoin

One of the biggest supporters of Cryptocurrency, Scottie Pippen spoke about meeting the anonymous developer of Bitcoin, Satoshi in his dream. He even revealed that the Crypto whale had claimed that the value of Bitcoin would be at $84,650 in November 2024.
The Chicago Bulls alum’s dream came true as the value of Bitcoin skyrocketed to $90,000 per coin after Donald Trump came into power in 2024. During an appearance on Money Making by the famous media outlet Fox Business, Pippen was asked if he bought Bitcoins after his dream, he said-
“No, I didn’t. I didn’t buy any more. But I felt like I had made a pretty good prediction.”
While talking about his dream, Pippen further added-
“[Satoshi] didn’t explain it to me then [in 1993.] If so, I would have been a lot farther ahead of the game. And like most people, I sort of got out of the gate late. I started really learning about Bitcoin last year. I think it was around $33,000 or so per coin. And so I really started to study the whole world and to try and get a little bit more educated about it,”
Bitcoin came back to the spotlight as soon as Donald Trump was re-elected for the second term as the US President. The popular cryptocurrency not only came on the first page of the world map again but also a prominent fluctuation in its valuation brought back the good old days for the Bitcoin holders across the globe.
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Shares of technology company Rumble (RUM -6.39%) are at 52-week highs as of this writing, having jumped roughly 300% in value since lows set back in January. And much of its leap is thanks to a massive $775 million investment from the investment arm of Tether Limited, the company behind the cryptocurrency stablecoin Tether (USDT -0.04%).

Tether is the third-largest cryptocurrency in the world by market capitalization. As of this writing, the market cap is almost $140 billion, which trails only Bitcoin and Ethereum. But Tether isn’t like these other two cryptocurrencies; it’s a stablecoin.

A stablecoin intends to have a 1-to-1 price correlation with something else. For example, a U.S. dollar stablecoin should always be worth $1. It’s for people who want to explore the world of cryptocurrency without the volatility. Simply explained, they deposit $1 and Tether issues one new stablecoin worth $1.

According to Tether, it had about $125 billion in reserves as of Sept. 30 (its market cap was $119 billion at the time). Most of these reserves are in U.S. Treasury bills. It needs to hold these reserves in case people want to redeem their stablecoins for dollars. But Tether is able to make money for itself with these massive reserves in the meantime.

Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino recently said it’s on pace to earn $10 billion in net profit in 2024, which is an astounding amount for any company, let alone a cryptocurrency company. And the company doesn’t simply rake in these profits, but rather it invests its money from time to time, which is what it’s doing with Rumble.

Why the market is excited about Tether’s investment in Rumble

Rumble turned heads when it went public in 2022 because this little company has big ambitions. The company intends to build internet infrastructure that’s free from censorship and it hopes to compete with Alphabet‘s video streaming platform, YouTube; Amazon‘s cloud computing service, AWS; social media platforms; and more.

The problem is that Rumble can’t simply wish all of this into existence — it takes money. And when ambitions are this high, it costs a lot of money to build. Unsurprisingly, the company had a net loss of $116 million in 2023 and has already lost another $102 million in the first three quarters of 2024.

But give Rumble some credit. The chart below shows its outstanding share count with the orange line. Ignore the brief spike shortly after it went public (the accounting of these things can get temporarily distorted upon going public). The chart shows that, to date, management hasn’t been raising money by diluting shareholders with stock offerings. It also hasn’t been taking on debt.

RUM Total Long Term Debt (Quarterly) data by YCharts

To the contrary, Rumble has been funding its growth with cash on hand. And I believe that’s the right move. After all, the company got its cash from its shareholders in the first place. These shareholders expect it to achieve its long-term vision by actually using this cash.

However, Rumble is still burning cash at a fast pace and investors were getting worried about liquidity. The stock consequently skyrocketed when Tether announced its massive investment because the fears regarding liquidity were alleviated.

There are reasons for optimism with Rumble. In the third quarter of 2024, the company had 67 million monthly active users — that’s nothing to sneeze at. Granted, that’s down from its user base of 71 million in the third quarter of 2022. But it’s a large, engaged user base nonetheless.

The challenge has been growing revenue by getting advertisers to buy into Rumble’s potential. As CEO Chris Pavlovski lamented on the Q3 earnings call, “How much longer can brand advertisers ignore more than half the country?”

Rumble does have a premium subscription service that makes up for lack of interest from advertisers. But ad revenue is still important to the company and Pavlovski’s question is an admission that this is an ongoing headwind for the business. And, unfortunately, it’s impossible to know how much longer it will be before advertising demand picks up.

The good news for Rumble’s shareholders is that however long it is, it now has a longer runway than it had before thanks to the infusion of cash from Tether. While there are still a lot of moving pieces here and more details with the transaction that are worth knowing, the main takeaway is that Rumble has more time than it had before. And when it comes to investing, more time is almost always a good thing.

Do Kwon, the co-founder of collapsed cryptocurrency startup Terraform Labs, will be extradited from Montenegro to the U.S. to face federal fraud charges, as first reported by Bloomberg.

Kwon faces charges in both the U.S. and South Korea; Terraform Labs’ TerraUSD and Luna cryptocurrencies crashed in 2022, causing investors to lose over $40 billion.

Terraform and Kwon were found personally liable for fraud following a civil trial on U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission allegations in April. Terraform agreed to pay $4.5 billion to settle the case with the SEC.

Kwon was arrested in March 2023 at the airport in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, while preparing to board a flight to Dubai. It’s unclear when Montenegro plans on releasing Kwon to the U.S. and whether the government’s latest decision supersedes its order in August to extradite Kwon to South Korea.