Rising hockey star’s new life in Ethereum after devastating car crash: Trevor Koverko

Not everyone can say they were there when history was being made. But former ice hockey star Trevor Koverko, on the mend from a serious car accident, witnessed it firsthand in his hometown.

“I was at a meet-up in Toronto and this guy named Vitalik was handing out documents, which turned out to be the Ethereum whitepaper. We had a cluster of really important high-profile people that came out of that time in Toronto. Vitalik, Joe Lubin and Charles Hoskinson, for example.”

In Canada, ice hockey is its own kind of subculture. Koverko had fallen in love with the sport at a young age, and by the time he was a teen, he was competing at the semi-pro level and moved away from home, playing to crowds of 10,000.

Landing your dream job before graduating from high school felt too good to be true. At 18, Koverko was an NHL draft pick for the New York Rangers. He had his whole life ahead of him. Until he didn’t.

When he was 24, Koverko was in a serious car accident. He suffered a catastrophic brain injury and was paralyzed on his left side for weeks. It abruptly ended his career as an athlete and nearly ended his life.

Six years later, in 2017, Koverko founded a security token project – well before tokenization was a thing – that raised $75 million and reached a $1 billion market cap. His journey into crypto was a combination of good luck and good management.

Koverko was in the hospital for months. He had to learn to walk and speak again, while processing the death of his dream. Hockey was over, and he knew he had to reinvent himself. Then, Silicon Valley and the startup scene caught his attention.

He enrolled in business school and moved in with his parents to start the long road to recovery, while accepting that the accident had permanently damaged his body. He became the poster boy for the best-case scenario for brain injuries of that caliber.

Buying Bitcoin on eBay and hanging with Roger Ver

While completing his studies (and feeling disconnected from the traditional banking-consulting path he was going down), he stumbled upon a forum that was talking about this thing called Bitcoin. These were early days, around 2011-2012. 

“It was such a pure thing because no one was making money. Everyone was living in their parents’ basement, so it wasn’t just me. It was a hacker and libertarian community. Eventually, it got more technologically minded as time went on and people realized the architecture behind it,” he says.

In 2012, he bought his first $20 worth of Bitcoin — on eBay.

Koverko started running with the early Bitcoin OGs, such as Roger Ver. Splitting his time between Silicon Valley and Toronto, the ex-hockey star athlete started to see really legit people talking about crypto, like Marc Andreessen. Back in Toronto, the seeds of Ethereum were being sown by a young Bitcoiner named Vitalik.

Toronto was the right place right time for Ethereum

Enamored by the technology and obsessed with the idea that there was no big bank issuing the money or insider allocation, Koverko soon decided the traditional path wasn’t for him. Now entrenched in the Toronto scene, he would try his hand at entrepreneurship.

There was something oddly liberating about this period, he tells Magazine. “I had nothing to lose.”

When Ethereum came along, he realized its potential to tokenize real-world assets and other financial instruments — a process that’s still in its early stages even today in 2025 .

“I had the idea to tokenize an existing financial asset I had, which was ownership in a small private equity fund. I told a friend – Anthony Di Iorio, the co-founder of Ethereum – but he didn’t think it was onchain enough and felt too TradFi. Finally, instead of building a tokenized fund, I came up with the idea of building a protocol that allowed anyone to tokenize anything,” he said. That became Polymath, the original and largest RWA tokenization platform.

It took the better part of a decade for RWAs to become a thing, but Koverko was directionally correct. Not a bad bet for this ex-athlete’s first move.

Also read: Sunny Lu — Getting scammed for 100 Bitcoin led him to create VeChain

Predicting the rise of RWAs on Ethereum in 2017

When asked about how he predicted the rise of RWAs, he says he just followed a pattern he’d noticed. “Every couple of years, a new category would get tokenized.”