Celebrity NFT Stans: Steph Curry, Matt Damon, Serena Williams, & More

We’ve all been there. Someone you admire suddenly adds laser eyes to their avatar. They’ve been red-pilled into the world of crypto.

While plenty of random people have hopped headfirst into the world of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, celebrities have played no small role in driving the market to frothy new heights. Some are to be expected. (We’re looking at you, Kim Kardashian and Tom Brady.) But as NFTs have taken off and the temptation to cash in has grown, so has the number of celebrities jumping on board. This list is by no means exhaustive, but here are some of the celebrities who, while still on the Earth in body, have since tried to go to the moon in the crypto world. They will be missed.

When TikTok announced an NFT program, Lil Nas X was slated to be among the first of the platform’s users to participate in a drop. On the one hand, this made sense. Lil Nas X has been nothing if not a trendsetter. After getting his break for crossing over rap and country, he’s become a genre-defining hip hop star. From that perspective, getting into NFTs makes sense. Even if you feel the aesthetic of most NFTs is equivalent to a bag of dog shit on fire, you can at least kind of get it.

On Jan. 20, we woke up to Serena Williams tweeting “GM” and posting a pink bored ape. Heartbreaking. She followed that with another “GM” tweet about a company called Sorare that offers to let users “Experience true football connection in The Global Fantasy Football Game! Collect & trade digital cards.” You truly hate to see it.

The winningest tennis player in the Grand Slam era, Serena really doesn’t need to go down this road. Sure, a tennis career only lasts so long and Serena probably wants something to do. But this? Really?

Her husband is Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian (a fellow bored ape avatar-haver), so maybe this pivot isn’t that surprising. He bought her the ape as well as a cryptopunk last year. Ohanian even wore a pin of it to the Met Gala last year, ending his tweet showing it off with “WAGMI.” (“We’re all going to make it,” for the non-red pilled among us.) Serena hasn’t reached that level. Yet.

Reese Witherspoon was once the face of Conservation International, doing a powerful PSA for the group about the importance of combatting climate change back in 2015. So you wouldn’t think she’d be hopping on the environmentally horrific NFT trend less than a decade later. But the 2020’s are full of surprises, and Witherspoon’s NFT obsession is apparently one of them. From this past October onward, she’s been tweeting about the tokens on a fairly regular basis, even sporting an NFT artwork as her profile picture on Twitter right now.

But perhaps the most cringe statement she’s made on the “art form” (if you can call it that) came earlier this month, when Witherspoon tweeted that in the “(near) future every person will have a parallel digital identity.”

“Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm,” she wrote. “Are you planning for this?”

Whether or not that’s actually gonna come to pass, Reese is still fully plugged in to the crypto hype. Good for her, I guess?

Paris Hilton is no stranger to trying any sort of business venture, questionable or otherwise. The heiress has at least one failed fashion line, a music career that tanked after producing a single album, and more B-grade acting roles than you can probably count. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that when NFT’s became the new hot thing in the middle of last year, Hilton jumped on the trend faster than you could say “The Simple Life,” selling her first collection in April of last year.