NBA Top Shot’s importance in driving mainstream blockchain awareness and use cannot be overstated, with a current valuation of over $7.5 billion and strong support from NFT collectors, investors, and trading card enthusiasts alike. Whether you’re new to NBA Top Shot or a seasoned collector, here’s our quick guide to NBA Top Shot.
What Exactly is NBA Top Shot?
Before launching, NBA Top Shot had been in development for about a year.
During the first few months of the collaboration in 2020, Dapper set the tone by launching their own blockchain, Flow, which is described on its official website as a “developer-friendly blockchain built to support the next generation of games, apps, and digital assets.”
Because NBA Top Shot is an officially licensed product of the NBA (and the Retired Players Association), nearly every player is eligible to have their own Moment minted and included in a Top Shot pack.
Top Shot is effectively creating a space where people who are interested in NFTs, collectibles, and, most importantly, basketball can come together and get excited about owning a piece of sports history.
The Fundamentals
Top Shot is essentially an NFT marketplace where users can buy, sell, and collect influential NBA scoring Moments. Moments are minted in Packs, much like physical trading cards: you buy a pack, open it up, and see what you get. Each Moment is a unique NFT created on the Flow blockchain that depicts a single highlight from a major play in NBA history.
Packs are minted in Sets as part of a Series, with each series’ timeline running concurrently with the NBA season – for example, Series 1 ran throughout the 2020 season, and Series 2, which we’re currently on, will most likely conclude after the NBA Finals.
While pack drops are influenced by current season events, legacy fans should not be concerned because there is plenty of opportunity to collect retroactive Moments, such as Michael Carter-Williams’ 2013 dunk.
Top Shot Ecosystem: Moments, Sets, and Packs
Moments are individual NFTs that make up the Top Shot ecosystem; however, collecting entails much more than just buying and selling one-off moments. Each Moment comes from a pack, which is part of a set, and the rarity of a Moment varies greatly depending on the type of set or pack from which it came.
Rarities are classified into three types: common, rare, and legendary. There is also an Ultimate rarity, but this class of highly sought-after Moments will only be available through auction with edition sizes of one or three.
Sets are classified into two types: base and non-base.
How to Capture a Moment
Low (1 – 99) and perfect (100/100) mint numbers are always more expensive. This was true for trading card valuation and is unquestionably true for NFTs. Vanity numbers like 69, 420, 888, and so on are also highly sought after, but it’s an especially big W when you get a mint number that matches a player’s jersey number.
Scarcity will always be a major factor in the value of NFTs. Top Shot makes it simple to see which Moments are more scarce than others.
Under the name of the Moment in the Top Shots marketplace, you’ll see either a CC or LE.
CC is an abbreviation for “Circulating Count,” and it represents the number of editions of that Moment that are currently in circulation. These Moments are considered open editions because there is no limit to the number that can be minted and will continue to be sold until they expire.
LE is an abbreviation for Limited Edition, which means that these moments are limited and usually in smaller quantities (50, 100, 750, etc. edition sizes). These LE’s typically generate the most sales on the site.
When you own multiple moments, you can sell, gift, and showcase them (create a collection/album). Burn mechanisms have yet to be implemented, but they are expected to be in place very soon.
Other Ways to Collect
If opening packs isn’t exciting enough for you, Challenges and Quests are a big part of the Top Shot ecosystem.
Challenges
which are distinct from pack drops and marketplace sales, award rewards to participants who complete tasks within a specific timeframe. Top Shot will typically issue a challenge with the instructions to collect x number of moments in x number of days/hours. When the challenge concludes, each user who completed it will receive a newly minted Moment.
Quests
are similar to challenges, but instead of giving users instructions to collect specific Moments, Top Shot sends them on a scavenger hunt to find and showcase Moments that embody specific characteristics. Quests are a bit more “do your own research” but have similar rewards to challenges for those who complete them, whether it’s compiling a roster of players with a specific number of assists or collecting all 2021 points-per-game season leaders.
Trading and Flipping
It’s no secret that users have made a lot of money by flipping Top Shot Moments. Whether you’re a basketball fan or not, the platform has secured the top spot on the all-time sales volume chart among all NFT projects.
Although there has been some controversy in the past regarding users’ inability to withdraw trading revenue from the site, recent updates to the Dapper Balance system appear to have smoothed things over.
NBA Top Shot’s Future
Despite high-profile sales, FUD, and talk of the Top Shot “bubble” bursting, the platform’s future remains bright. Dapper is gearing up for an off-season full of community building and giving back to users after securing a sizable bag in their most recent funding round.
With the NFT market as a whole experiencing a slowdown in recent months, providing utility to NFT holders is at the top of every developer’s priority list – and Top Shot is no exception.
One exciting feature on the horizon for Top Shot users is Trade Tickets. Top Shot will use tickets to reintroduce unsold Moments from Series 1 to the market. In the future, trade tickets will be redeemable for one unsold Moment from Top Shot’s early days. And trading works both ways, which may entice users to trade in their existing Common Moments for a ticket that allows them to collect some of Top Shot’s most historic NFTs.
Hardcourt will be the mobile game for NBA Top Shot that can be played with Moments. So far, we know it will be a user vs. user arcade style game in which players have customizable attributes based on the Moments they have in their account.
Another major project that Top Shot is working on is IRL utility. Roham has tweeted about a variety of opportunities for Moment owners, including signed merch, VIP tickets, voting on new Moments, and more. Time will tell what actually gets implemented, but there appears to be no shortage of ideas among Dappers’ developer team.
The NBA has yet to announce plans to bring back former players who aren’t members of the Retired Players Association, including Michael Jordan. However, given that MJ collaborated with Kevin Durant, Will Smith, Klay Thompson, 2 Chainz, and others during Top Shot’s March funding round, the general consensus is that these one-time deals are still on the way.
With high-profile types like Mark Cuban and Dapper’s CEO Roham Gharegozlou voicing their support for Top Shot (Gharegozlou is even one of the site’s top 5 collectors), it’ll be interesting to see who else joins the ecosystem during the next NFT market influx.
Cool Resources for Collectors
These sites can help in ranking and tracking NBA Top Shot Moments.
Moment Ranks can be extremely useful in determining the worth of your Moment.
NFTSnipers has an excellent, ever-expanding buyers guide.
OTM (Own The Moment) NFT gathers the most complete and up-to-date information on challenges.
If you enjoyed this article you might also like: NFT Global Fantasy Football: A Quick Guide to Sorare