The collective sales volume of NBA Top Shot NFTs has dropped 99% from its February 2021 peak.
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NBA Top Shot is a nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace that enables basketball fans to buy, sell and trade NBA-themed digital collectibles.
These collectibles are “Moments” — NFTs of NBA video clips and digital art — available per their degree of rarity. In other words, users can trade NFTs that feature anything from a winning three-pointe from Luka Dončić to a dunk from Lebron James, depending on their availability.
The concept is akin to traditional sports collectible where fans attempt to acquire the rarest of items associated with teams, with an aim to either collect or sell it later at a higher price. Except, in the case of NFTs, these collectibles are digital — unique cryptographic tokens that exist on a blockchain and theoretically cannot be replicated.
NBA Top Shot is officially licensed by the NBA, the NBA Players Association, and Dapper Labs. The marketplace runs on the FLOW blockchain, which Dapper Labs built as a developer-friendly ledger to support “the next generation of games, apps, and digital assets.”
As explained above, the NBA Top Shot platform functions like trading cards. It starts with the NBA licensing its reels and digital art to Dapper Labs. In turn, Dapper Labs uses the footage to create Moments as NFTs.
Each Moment has a unique serial number attached to it, which guarantees its authenticity and shows its rarity. In addition, the Dapper Labs team creates only a limited number of NFTs to ensure scarcity. As a result, the commonly available Moments are cheaper in valuation than the rarer ones. The NBA Top Shot website explains that:
Moments come as a part of “Packs,” similar to how traditional sports cards come in a bundle. In turn, packs are a part of the so-called “Series,” which gets launched concurrently with the NBA season. So, fans can collect new packs of NFT moments that feature the season’s best highlights.
In addition, fans can collect Moments from the past depending on their availability. For example, they can get Magic Johnson’s dunk from May 16, 1980.
Collecting NBA Top Shot Moments is not a straightforward task. Typically, users do not know what Moments they will receive when they go ahead with a purchase, given the availability of each NFT depends on the the kind of set or Pack it comes from.
NBA Top Shot features four types of Moments: Common, Fandom, Rare, and Legendary. There is also a fifth category, called Ultimate, but this Moment is attainable only via auction. Anyway, here’s how the other four categories work:
Dapper Labs groups the top shot Moments into Packs and presents them as Sets. These Sets come in two distinctive categories: Base and Non-Base. Here’s how they work:
Challenges and Quests serve as a parallel avenue from where NBA Top Shot users can receive Moments, but as rewards not sales.
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For instance, Challenges grant rewards to users who fulfil a given task in a specific timeframe. In detail, NBA Top Shot can launch a challenge with directives to collect a particular number of Moments in specific hours or days. Users who complete the challenge receive a freshly minted Moment.
Similarly, Quests offer rewards to users for finishing tasks, except the tasks are like scavenger hunts, wherein users are told to locate and build an exhibit for Moments with certain characteristics. As a result, Quests appear to be more difficult than Challenges and, therefore, return greater rewards.
The demand for NBA Top Shot exploded in 2021 with its sales volume reaching a pick around $224 million in sales volume from over 80,820 unique buyers in February. By November 2022, the sales volume had declined to about $2 million from some 10,000 unique buyers.
The crash in demand came in line with similar drops across the NFT space with many leading projects, including Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, witnessing lower demand. As a result, some analysts rubbished the NFT market altogether, calling it a bubble.
2022 was the year of killing scams:
NFT bubble burst
Crypto collapsed alongside corps like FTX that were huge Ponzi schemes
Conservative pollsters making up numbers were proven wrong
Trump’s company was found guilty of tax fraud
Investors realized Elon Musk isn’t a genius
As a result, venturing into NBA Top Shot space to speculate on its Moments remains a risky proposition and potential collectors should never invest more money than they can afford to lose.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
