Kevin Durant forgot his Coinbase password. It paid off
Kevin Durant may be the only investor whose best trade was forgetting a password.
The Houston Rockets forward started buying Bitcoin on Coinbase in 2016, shortly after joining the Golden State Warriors. His business partner, Rich Kleiman, told CNBC's Game Plan conference in Los Angeles in September 2025 that the decision followed a party thrown by the venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, which the Warriors attended. "I just heard the word 'Bitcoin' 25 times this evening, and the next day, we started investing," Kleiman said.
Then the pair lost track of the login. "We've yet to be able to track down his Coinbase account info, so we've never sold anything, and this Bitcoin is just through the roof," Kleiman told the audience. "It's only benefited us."
The lockout did not last much longer. Days later Brian Armstrong, Coinbase's chief executive, posted on X: "We got this fixed. Account recovery complete." Kleiman told CNBC the problem had been "a user error on our end" and that the pair had already been working with Coinbase on it.
How long Durant was shut out is less clear. Kleiman put it at "a few years"; several crypto outlets, and an X post by George Jarjour (@GeorgeOnTap) that revived the story this week, say nearly a decade.
The numbers are striking even without the size of the stake, which neither man has disclosed. Bitcoin traded between roughly $360 and $1,000 in 2016, according to CoinGecko, and CoinDesk estimates Durant paid about $650 a coin. Less than three weeks after he got back in, on October 6 2025, Bitcoin hit a record $126,223, nearly 200 times that price.
It has not stayed there. Bitcoin was trading at about $80,000 on Wednesday, according to CoinGecko, some 36 per cent below the peak. Measured from $650, that is still a gain of more than 120-fold. Being locked out, in other words, protected Durant from selling early; it could not protect him from the market.
Nor was the coin his biggest crypto win. Thirty Five Ventures, the investment firm Durant runs with Kleiman, joined Coinbase's 2017 Series D round, which valued the exchange at $1.6bn. When Coinbase listed on Nasdaq in April 2021 and closed its first day at an $86bn valuation, Sportico calculated that the stake was worth about 54 times what it cost. Durant's firm has since also been paid to promote Coinbase, under a multiyear deal struck in 2021.
_Image: Kevin Durant during his time with the Golden State Warriors. Photo by Cyrus Saatsaz, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cropped._
