NASSAU, BAHAMAS – SEPTEMBER 04: Coach Stephen Jackson of the Trilogy hoists the trophy after the … [+] Trilogy beat the 3 Headed Monsters 50-45 to win the BIG3 – Championship at Atlantis Paradise Island on September 04, 2021 in Nassau, Bahamas. (Photo by Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)
The 3-on-3 basketball league, BIG3, started by Ice Cube and Jeff Kwatinetz recently released sets of NFTs for its teams. From the layered release of NFTs both Snoop Dogg and Gary Vee have become owners of separate teams.
The NFT release worked on a tier-based system and can come with – what has been described by the league as – “ownership-like benefits”. 1000 NFTs were released for each of the league’s twelve teams. 975 gold NFTs and 25 Fire. The Fire NFTs were priced at $25,000 each and the gold at $5000 each.
Out of those 25 fire NFTs, a team CEO is selected. The prominent buyers that have been announced so far each bought all 25 of a team’s fire NFTs to guarantee their position.
The celebrity owners that have been announced so far are Snoop Dogg and co-founder of PayPal PYPL Ken Howery, Gary Vaynerchuk and his VeeFriends NFT collection, NFT community DeGods, Bill Lee from MyDoge wallet, and Krause House – a basketball-centric web3 organization.
LOS ANGELES, CA – FEBRUARY 16: Snoop Dogg speaks during a press conference at adidas Creates 747 … [+] Warehouse St., an event in basketball culture, on February 16, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for adidas)
According to the league, fire tier holders will have several utilities included with their NFT purchase including:
“Access to weekly calls with your team to talk strategy leading up to each game.”
“Weekly video calls with referees to discuss rules and how you think their calls impacted the last game.”
“The unique opportunity to connect with commissioner Clyde Drexler as well as league founders Jeff Kwatinetz and Ice Cube three times a year to discuss fundamental strategy, changes, and ideas for the league.”
On the league’s new initiative and the plethora of new owners, Ice Cube said,
“We are absolutely thrilled to have Snoop, Ken, and their communities on board with the BIG3. Having someone with Ken’s knowledge and experience wanting to be a part of our league demonstrates that we are moving in the right direction.”
“Snoop is an undisputed legend who has jumped headfirst into the Web3 space and clearly understands the importance and the value of what we are trying to create. Together, I know they will take Bivouac to new heights and we can’t wait to get started.”
Around the viability of the collection, I spoke to Manav Golecha, an expert in the NFT space, on the viability to scale and sell NFT collections around celebrities in a brief period. Golecha famously started the Women of Crypto collection, which sold 8888 NFTs in 5 months. Women of Crypto however had a particular mission to empower and educate women in this financial and technological revolution.
“Any time you’re utilizing a strong brand name – and celebrities in this instance – it’s positive when it comes to NFT projects as a whole. Most NFT drops fail because of a lack of marketing and effort. With something like this, it’s important that the advertising of it is spot on, so people know it’s there, and also from a security standpoint it is protected and is on a secure platform. Which it looks like this is.”
From art to enhancing security and helping develop thriving communities – Golecha expands his abilities to make sure a project’s processes are secure end-to-end to benefit its community and to also strengthen the project’s marketing. He further helps NFT projects with auditing smart contracts to identify bugs. This helps NFT collections in optimising gas for their contract to reduce the overall gas fee.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars are stolen from people because of hackers in NFT Discord groups. Manav uses his skills in Discord cybersecurity to help NFT projects fight against hackers and remove webhooks from the Discord server. This helps bring down the probability of hacks and keeps the community secure.
Manav Golecha speaking on a podcast about web3.
Golecha also mentioned the need to give back through collections. He assists NFT collections in partnering with nonprofits to increase their impact. He’s also personally donated $100,000 to two entities, namely Women Who Code and Crypto Chicks.
“Philanthropic endeavors should be a key part of this industry. It’s certainly key for me and I stress to all my clients to make sure that they heavily contemplate how they will give back to a specific community or an area that they are passionate about.”
The BIG3 announced plans to launch a foundation two years ago to help former NBA and WNBA players and coaches navigate their post-basketball careers.
Currently, only 1.4 million individuals have activity on OpenSea, an NFT trading platform. Meaning that 99.9% of the internet has not bought an NFT, yet. The quick sell-out and popularity of the fire NFTs however signify that gold NFTs probably aren’t far behind from selling out also.
Golecha predicts that this will change in 15 years and NFTs will have a significant market.
Two big drivers for this growth according to him will be the upcoming Coinbase marketplace which already has roughly 3.7 million users on the waiting list and Eth 2.0 which will drastically reduce gas fees once the network moves from proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake mechanism.
The BIG3 league’s fifth season starts on June 18th, on CBS and Paramount+ where it will receive live coverage.

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