NBA Legend Shaq Wins Partial Victory in Astrals NFT Lawsuit, But His Battle Isn’t Over Yet

NBA Legend Shaquille O’Neal, also known as Shaq, will have to defend allegations in a class action lawsuit related to its involvement in the Astrals non-fungible token project.

What happened:A U.S. court partially granted and partially dismissed a class action lawsuit against O’Neal over his role in the NFT project, Coindesk reported Monday.

The project, which included a collection of 10,000 3D NFT avatars and a decentralized autonomous organization for incubating innovative projects, is at the center of the lawsuit.

The complaint alleges that O’Neal, who was the face of Astrals, encouraged investors to join the project. The complaint further claims that O’Neal abandoned the project after the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed FTX, causing a significant drop in the value of Astrals’ financial products.

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The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Miami Division, rejected the claim that O’Neal was a “control person,” but upheld the allegation that Astrals sold unregistered “securities.”

Why it matters:The ongoing dispute has been going on for over a year. The complainant Daniel Harper stated that O’Neal was aware of potential regulatory issues surrounding the sale of unregistered securities, but nonetheless promoted them to grow its cryptocurrency business.

Prior to that, the former NBA star had been sued over his alleged involvement in promoting FTXthe trading platform that went bankrupt in the fall of 2022. O’Neal said he was simply acting as a paid spokesperson for an advertisement.

O’Neal wasn’t the only sports celebrity embroiled in a legal dispute over NFTs. The football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo was named in a Billion-dollar class action lawsuitfor allegedly promoting investments in unregistered securities on the Binance BNB/USD network.

Price action:At the time of writing, Solana’s floor price SOL/USDThe Bitcoin-based Astrals NFT collection was trading at $17.16, up nearly 4% in the past 24 hours, according to to CoinGecko.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.

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