Canadian musician Drake bet $1.26 million on the Super Bowl and profited to the tune of nearly $300,000 this Sunday, and bitcoin investor Anthony Pompliano had some theories on why the rapper used BTC to stake his bet.
BeInCrypto previously reported, Drake first revealed his $1M+ mega bet on Friday.
To recap, the rap superstar made a total of three bets, amounting to around $1.26 million staked. The first bet was on the Rams winning the Super Bowl, the second was on Odell Beckham Jr making a touchdown, and the third that the wide receiver would make 62.5 receiving yards during the game.
With the first two bets proving successful, Drake collected around $1.55 million, recovering his initial $1.26 million stake and making the rapper almost $300,000 in profit. While sports betting fans might have greater interest in the bets themselves, as far as Anthony Pompliano is concerned, the big ticket news item was that Drake staked the bet in bitcoin.
“The idea of why Drake would be using bitcoin is what everyone is talking about,” asserted Pompliano on his Monday podcast. “Now of course there’s just really simple explanations, like banks have hours of operations – you can’t actually wire large sums of money like $1.3 million dollars at the weekends or off hours – but there’s also geographic arbitrage as well.”
“Sometimes to use these betting services they want bitcoin rather than dollars, settlement times are faster and the cost is cheaper. is superior from a technology format.”
BTC is ‘good for Drake’
While Pompliano shared a number of reasons why he believed Drake would choose bitcoin over fiat, his ultimate takeaway was that the choice was good for crypto.
“Now one of the most popular musicians in the world is using bitcoin, not only as a store of value but as a medium of exchange as well. If Drake is talking about bitcoin, posting it online and the media is talking about it, that means that more and more people will be saying, ‘if bitcoin is good or Drake, then maybe it’s good enough for me as well,’” Pompliano said.
Drake’s major bet wasn’t the only positive crypto-related news from this year’s Super Bowl. A COINBASE ad which ran during the sporting event proved so popular with viewers that the exchange had to throttle traffic to prevent the site from crashing
