A piece of Michael Jordan’s final Chicago Bulls championship run has set another collecting record. His white No. 23 jersey from Game 3 of the 1998 NBA Finals sold for approximately ₿145.6 ($12.26 million), using a contemporaneous Bitcoin price near $84,200. Because Bitcoin moves continuously, the BTC figure is approximate.
The result was confirmed by JOOPITER, Pharrell Williams’ digital auction house, which lists the sale as a world auction record for an NBA game-worn jersey. Independent reporting also confirmed the $12.26 million result and that it surpassed the previous Jordan memorabilia record.
A jersey from the Last Dance
Jordan wore the jersey on June 7, 1998, when Chicago beat the Utah Jazz 96-54 in Game 3 of the NBA Finals. Jordan scored 24 points as the Bulls took a 2-1 series lead on the way to their sixth championship in eight seasons.
The auction result also extends the extraordinary market for basketball history. BitcoinVersus.Tech has previously examined the long-term collectible potential surrounding LeBron James memorabilia, while modern NBA economics can turn even disciplinary headlines such as Anthony Edwards’ $50,000 fine into a reminder of how dramatically basketball’s financial scale has expanded.
Polymarket Sports highlighted the record sale shortly after the auction closed.
One bid, one enormous record
The jersey carried a $10 million to $15 million estimate and ultimately realized $12.26 million. Its significance comes from more than Jordan’s name: it is tied to a specific Finals victory during the season later immortalized as “The Last Dance,” and JOOPITER describes it as the only publicly known white game-winning jersey from the 1998 Finals to surface.
CTV News also circulated the sale as a new record for Jordan memorabilia, reinforcing how quickly the auction result moved from the collectibles market into mainstream sports coverage.
Basketball as a global asset class
The sale illustrates how elite sports memorabilia increasingly behaves like a scarce alternative asset: provenance, cultural importance and an extremely limited supply can matter as much as the physical object itself. Jordan’s 1998 Finals run combines all three.
The financial scale surrounding modern basketball extends far beyond collectibles. Even infrastructure around the sport has become a technology and energy story, as seen in BitcoinVersus.Tech’s look at the solar-powered Intuit Dome.
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