Ice Cube’s BIG3 Swaps Ken Howery’s NFTs For League Equity As $290M Merger Talk Builds
Ice Cube built the BIG3 from a summer-run idea into a real sports business — and now one of the league’s earliest NFT bets just turned into actual ownership. The league swapped the Fire-tier NFTs held by PayPal co-founder Ken Howery for equity units in BIG3 HoldCo LLC, according to previously unreported federal records detailed by The Washington Sun.
Howery is not a casual name on the cap table. He co-founded PayPal alongside Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and he now serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Denmark. Back in May 2022, he and Snoop Dogg teamed up to buy all 25 Fire-tier tokens for the BIG3 team Bivouac — the league’s top ownership tier at $25,000 a token. His holdings were valued between $100,001 and $250,000, per the records. Under a settlement dated August 19, those tokens are gone — replaced by league equity units whose value has not been disclosed.
The swap did not come out of nowhere. Other Fire-tier buyers have accused the league of “deceptive, fraudulent, and illegal marketing,” alleging that after teams were sold, BIG3 renamed them and called the originals “on hiatus” so it would not have to share the sale money — Fire holders had been promised a collective 40 percent of the net proceeds from a team sale. BIG3 disputes those allegations and previously dismissed the lawsuit as “a classic nuisance suit for an asset class that has lost all value, brought in an effort to extort the BIG3.” The fight moved from a proposed class action into individual arbitration, and the settlements keep coming: SEC filings cited in the reporting show agreements with two NFT purchasers in 2025 and two more in the first half of 2026.
The timing matters because of where the BIG3 says it is headed. The league has a deal in place to combine with Graf Global in a merger that values the BIG3 at $290 million on a pre-money basis, and every equity-linked holding is set to convert into stock of the combined company if it closes. That is the real play behind the swap — Howery traded digital tokens tied to one team for a piece of the whole league, right as that league tries to step onto the public market.
Cube has been saying for years that the BIG3 is a business, not a side project. A PayPal co-founder holding league equity while a $290 million merger sits on the table says the money world is treating it that way too. Does a public BIG3 change the game for independent sports leagues — or is Cube better off keeping it private and in-house?
Story via AllHipHop, based on The Washington Sun’s reporting of Office of Government Ethics records and SEC filings.
Read next: Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ Climbs Back To No. 2 On The Billboard 200
