NBA Top Shot won over countless fans with its Moment Packs that triggered the nostalgia and excitement around sports trading cards. Now, 17 months on from its October 2020 launch, NBA Top Shot is a full-blown NFT ecosystem of its own.
Want to dive into NBA Top Shot and start collecting some packs of your own? Let’s take a look at Top Shot, how it works and how to start collecting Packs today.
The background on NBA Top Shot
NBA Top Shot is a collaboration between the NBA, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), and blockchain company Dapper Labs. In essence, Top Shot recreates the experience of basketball trading cards on the blockchain by selling packs of NFTs called “Moments” on the Flow blockchain.
By all accounts, NBA Top Shot is one of the most important NFT collections in the industry’s short history. Its explosion through late 2020 and early 2021 brought more mainstream attention to NFTs than ever before. Since its launch in October 2020, it has seen an all-time sales volume of over $880 million.
How does NBA Top Shot work?
Basically, the NBA Top Shot platform is a marketplace where people can trade digital trading cards in the form of NFTs. As noted above, the individual NFTs in NBA Top Shot are called Moments. To explain, these Moments are digital videos of major highlights of key plays from NBA history.
Moments, Packs, Sets, and Series
What’s more, the primary sale of Moments happens in “Packs”. Packs in NBA Top Shot work the same way that packs of trading cards do in real life. That is to say, buyers have no idea which individual Moments are in the Packs they purchase until after they buy and open them. In addition, Moments come in three tiers of rarity – Common, Rare, and Legendary.
NBA Top Shot releases its Packs as parts of Sets (more on those below), which are themselves parts of Series. Series correspond to the current NBA season. For example, Top Shot is currently on Series 3 as we are in the third NBA season that has happened since Top Shot launched.
It’s important to note that the rarity of an individual moment can depend on the Pack or Set that it came from. In fact, there are two different kinds of Sets: Base and Non-Base. Base Sets always contain Common Moments. As such, Base Sets are the most affordable (starting at just $9) and Dapper Labs releases these sets fairly regularly.
In contrast, Non-Base Sets contain Packs with Rare or Legendary Moments, as well as Common Moments. As a result, NBA Top Shot Packs from Non-Base Sets are more expensive. However, both Base and Non-Base Sets frequently sell out, given the relative scarcity of drops and the high demand for Top Shot Packs.
Given the random allotment of Moments in Packs, NBA Top Shot has a thriving secondary market for highly coveted Moments. After all, just like with physical trading cards, there are countless NBA fans who would pay top dollar for a Moment featuring their favorite player, or a Moment from a historic game.
How to start collecting NBA Top Shot Packs
One of the reasons that NBA Top Shot first took off, and has stayed relevant, is the fact that getting started with Top Shot Packs is a fair bit easier than buying a regular NFT on the secondary market, let alone minting one. Firstly, users can sign up for a Dapper Labs account with their email address. Once they’ve done that, they’re ready to start shopping for Packs!
Making payments in the NBA Top Shot Marketplace
Another key point is that Moments and Packs on NBA Top Shot are all priced in USD. This means that you don’t even need to have any crypto in order to buy Top Shot Packs. That is to say that you can simply purchase Packs and Moments with a debit or credit card. With that said, you can also purchase Packs and Moments using Bitcoin, Ether, Bitcoin Cash, DAI, and USDC.
Dapper Labs does actually have its own kind of currency called Dapper Balance. Like the NBA Top Shot Packs and Moments, users can buy Dapper Balance using a debit card, credit card, or crypto. Dapper Balance isn’t at all necessary to buy packs in NBA Top Shot, but Dapper suggests that it allows users to purchase moments faster.
Collecting your first NBA Top Shot Pack
As mentioned above, NBA Top Shot Packs sell out rapidly on launch. Luckily, Dapper has made it possible for anyone to buy their first pack. To that end, NBA Top Shot is offering its Starter Packs for $19 at the time of writing. These Packs are only accessible to those who have bought fewer than five packs before. Thus, it caters to people who are brand new to NBA Top Shot.
Every Starter Pack includes four Moments. Three of the moments are Series 3 Base Set Moments, meaning that they are Common. The fourth moment can be Common, Rare, or Legendary.
NBA Top Shot’s secondary marketplace
Given the nature of opening NBA Top Shot Packs, you cannot buy Packs on the secondary market. To say nothing of the fact that many Packs require users to have “Trade Tickets”, which they can only get by trading in moments. Therefore, buying individual Moments on secondary can also be helpful for people getting started with Top Shot.
The secondary market on Top Shot plays out much as it does on other NFT marketplaces. In other words, price is heavily dependent on rarity, the number of editions of the specific Moment, and the Moment’s token ID. Moments can go for as low as $2, with the most expensive sale – a Legendary Lebron James Moment – coming in at around $230,000.
The future for NBA Top Shot
All things considered, NBA Top Shot has cemented itself as a massive NFT marketplace for a year and a half. It currently boasts over 800,000 users and has some high-profile backers including many current and former NBA stars.
While the road hasn’t always been smooth for NBA Top Shot, and sales volume has risen and fallen as with NFTs in general, it still routinely sells out new packs. As a matter of fact, it saw its sales volume go up by 72% last month. And given the popularity of the NBA globally, and the fact that it is still much easier to onboard into Top Shot than other marketplaces, it seems fair to say that it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
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This article is educational material.
As always, make your own research prior to making any kind of investment.
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