Basketball legend Shaquil O’Neil (commonly known as Shaq) had a bad day last week.

The towering seven-foot-one former super athlete was served two crypto lawsuits in one day regarding his involvement in the promotion of defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which collapsed last November, and over his non-fungible token (NFT) project Astrals which was launched last March.

FTX used to pay celebrities like Shaq and former NFL quarterback Ton Brady to promote its platform and give it an aura of legitimacy.

Celebrities linked to FTX have faced a litany of lawsuits over lending their credibility to the fraudulent company and thus baring some of the responsibility for the many billions of dollars that were lost.

Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Shaq over his Astrals project claims that the NFT release was actually an unregistered securities offering, with the future price performance of the NFTs themselves tied to promises made by Shaq.

The lawsuit claims that the Astrals NFT project meets the conditions set by the US Security and Exchange Commission’s Howey Test, which was first used to determine whether something is a security as far back as 1946.

Has Shaq Abandoned Astrals?

The suit regarding Shaq’s Astrals NFT project brings into question whether the former NBA star is actually even still involved in the project.

Reportedly, Shaq’s last engagement with the project’s community was via Discord on the 2nd of January.

The Solana blockchain-based project features 10,000 supposedly metaverse-ready NFT avatars, which would reportedly be useable within a story-driven, play-to-earn role-playing game.

But the lawsuits plaintiffs claim to have “suffered investment losses” as a result of Shaq’s conduct, or lack of engagement with the project, with the lawsuit claims was his “brain child”.

The plaintiff’s counsel Adam Moskowitz, founder of The Moskowitz Law Firm PLLC that is supporting the lawsuit against Shaq alongside Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, claims that Shaq falsely claimed to Astral NFT buyers that he would “never” abandon them, even after the collapse of FTX last November.

“Shaq even posted a video clip of the movie The Wolf of Wall Street, namely, to give the impression that he was not going anywhere,” Moskowitz continued, adding that “he has not been seen or heard from in months”.

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