Shaquille O’Neal may still be in hot water over Astral NFTs, says judge

A Miami judge didn’t dismiss a claim that basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal was a “seller” of Astrals NFTs and found they could be securities under US law.

Former pro basketball player Shaquille O’Neal will need to defend some of the claims brought against him in the Astral non-fungible token (NFT) class-action lawsuit.

The lawsuit, which has been ongoing for over a year, names O’Neal as a defendant. It alleges that the NFTs are unregistered securities that O’Neal once promoted online. 

In an Aug. 16 order on O’Neal’s motion to dismiss, Miami federal court judge Federico Moreno judged the plaintiffs properly alleged that O’Neal was a “seller” of the Astrals NFT project, meaning O’Neal will need to answer for that.

The judge, however, knocked back a claim that O’Neal was a person with control over the project.

The May 2023 lawsuit alleged that the NFTs are unregistered securities that O’Neal promoted online. Judge Moreno wrote that the lawsuit had “sufficiently alleged that Astrals and Galaxy tokens are ‘securities’ subject to federal securities laws.”

The lawsuit claimed O’Neal urged investors to “[h]op on the wave before its too late” and said the team would develop the project until it reached a floor price of 30 Solana (SOL) — worth about $90 when the collection launched in March 2022, according to the order.

The suit alleged O’Neal later left the project, which caused the value of the Astrals NFTs and Galaxy token to plummet.

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Meanwhile, the basketball star’s lawyers had argued that the case should be dismissed, claiming that O’Neal is neither a “seller” nor a “control person” of the project and that the NFTs and the Galaxy token are not securities under United States law.

O’Neal has until Sept. 12 to respond to the claims in the suit. O’Neal’s counsel did not immediately respond to a request for comment. O’Neal could not be reached for comment.

The floor price of the Astrals collection currently sits at 0.106 SOL — worth about $15.50, according to NFT marketplace Magic Eden.

Astrals is a Solana-based project featuring 10,000 NFTs, a metaverse called Astralworld and a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) with a governance token called Galaxy.

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