The title here is a bit misleading.
The article's actual headline is:
"NFLPA owed $41.8M in licensing and marketing payments from affiliate following crypto collapse" which is a more accurate description of what is happening.
This is ~25% of their expected annual revenue so it is a serious issue.
Many of these stories are "Our retirement fund trader decided to bet his entire pool on hideous monkey NFTs and lost it all, even though he was only authorized to buy relatively safe bonds. His manager was completely asleep at the wheel."
> The unpaid bills appear tied to the news in Sportico last month that Dapper Labs, the platform for the NBA’s and NFL’s sputtering nonfungible tokens, and DraftKings’ Reignmakers NFTs had each engaged the NFLPA to renegotiate their deals in light of the plummeting value of the digital assets. Then came a report this month that Dapper Labs’ NFL NFT was badly missing financial goals.
> “OneTeam would have expected around $60 million from Dapper & DraftKings, of that, $41 million would go to the NFLPA,” the person who has been involved in past NFLPA dealings wrote in a direct message. “Now, NFTs are relatively new, so most of the money typically comes from Madden and trading cards.” By that, this person means the bread-and-butter licensing businesses like video games and trading cards at the NFLPA remains healthy. Cryptocurrency is a relatively new category for the unions and has not been a relied-upon source of revenue. Still, this person described the nonpayments of $41.8 million as “horrific.”
> Cryptocurrencies like NFTs were all the rage two years ago, skyrocketing in value. Leagues and teams were inking cryptocurrency deals with companies like now-bankrupt FTX, and touting a wide range of NFTs. But crypto crashed along with NFTs, which are essentially authenticated digital duplicates of something real, like a highlight, a trading card or a work of art.
If your employer shut its doors because there was no market for its product or it didn't work all that well, you'd be OK with them not paying you for work you already did for them?
If you are owed wages, salaries, or commissions and the business you work for goes bankrupt, you are given priority over all unsecured creditors.
But what that means is that if the company is out of money and out of assets worth anything (as a lot of cryptocurrency adjacent orgs that went bust were), then there is little if anything for them to owe you.
You may get a few cents back on the dollar after banks and investors sell off everything left to cover their secured claims.
It's kind of shitty but that's just how debts work in the US. They owe you money but they have none and wash their hands of it so now you are out of luck.
Now in the case of the OP they probably would still get paid out given the org in question is still operating and is not bankrupt. It'll just take time for the court to do its thing.
... you do know that even just because "crypto" as a broad umbrella may be up, that doesn't mean that every company in the space is up, right? I mean the article highlights that fact...
>The unpaid bills appear tied to the news in Sportico last month that Dapper Labs, the platform for the NBA’s and NFL’s sputtering nonfungible tokens, and DraftKings’ Reignmakers NFTs had each engaged the NFLPA to renegotiate their deals in light of the plummeting value of the digital assets.
