Bitcoin & Sports Teams Are The Best Hedge Against Inflation | Chris Kelly

So I went to a game, this is probably 2019 or so.

Your partner Vivek, who is also a co-owner.

He's the controlling owner, we should be clear.

I'm a smaller partner, and he is effectively my boss, but he's a good friend.

I think he would say you

guys are partners.

But I went and I had the opportunity to go out and see the stadium, and I was blown away.

I've been to a lot of sports stadiums, and I think that my takeaway was basically the technology that was integrated into the stadium, the sustainability, but not like kind of like the woke sustainability stuff that's kind of like all appearance and no substance.

This was almost like no appearance

and, you know, all substance.

We were the first league platinum arena, so we wanted the certification, and we jumped through the hoops that you have to do to get that.

We put a tier four data center in the arena because we also knew we needed to run the hotel condo tower that we were building next door and the mall that we were refurbishing.

And we started mining Ethereum in the data center on the early side of that.

That may

or may not be why I was invited out there.

Should we do this type of activity? Exactly.

Exactly.

Well, we had a great visionary, you know, CTO in Ryan Montoya who, you know, pushed for us to do that.

But we had an ownership group that was very technologically oriented.

So with My History at Facebook, with Vivex at TIBCO, with the Jacobs family at Qualcomm.

So we had a bunch of very tech friendly and tech almost obsessive owners.

So we wanted to have, you know, something that would, you know, sort of be easily upgradable.

And building a data center in the arena was part of that vision.

I also think that there was this element of, like, when you have an ownership group that is doing this, like, investing in Bitcoin, building a stadium, owning the team, there was a lot of education and, like, knowledge transfer to the players, which I thought was pretty interesting.

And my wife would tell the story that we were walking through and getting a tour, and Vlade Divac showed up, and she was like...