How I Turned $27 to $10,000 Trading GIFs on NBA Top Shot
No, I’m not a basketball card savant. And no, I’m not going to sell you a course.
About 2 months ago, I found an article about how someone sold a video clip of a one-of-a-kind basketball moment for $2,200 on a marketplace for- what are essentially- NBA gifs. What makes a video clip one-of-a-kind? There’s only a limited amount of them and once they stop being “dropped” in sets of packs, the only place to buy them is the second-hand marketplace. Being an NBA and diehard Raptors fan myself, I went on to NBA Top Shot to see what all the hype was about. I grabbed a Kyle Lowry fadeaway over Kemba Walker in game 3 of the 2019–2020 Eastern Conference Finals and a Siakam block on Lebron James for a dollar each. Oh, and I spent $25 on a pack guaranteed to contain 1 “rare” moment. I opened it to find 4 common moments a rare De’andre Hunter dunk. It was a moment from his rookie campaign last year but, seeing that it was only selling for about $20 on the marketplace, it was nothing to get too excited about. I listed that moment for $400 as a joke and forgot about it for a month.
1 month later, I get a notification that my moment sold for $400 on the marketplace. My mouth dropped to the floor. I quickly dumped that $400 right back into the marketplace, excited about where this market would go. Fast forward another month and a couple dozen tweets from some well-known basketball players later and my moments are not worth a total of $9767 USD. That Lowry moment I bought for $1? It’s $399 now. What about the Siakam block? $479. Oh, and that De’andre Hunter Dunk I didn’t get too excited for? $3,100.
All that said: What is NBA Top Shot?
NBA Top Shot is a platform that lets fans buy and trade officially-licensed video highlights on the blockchain. You can think of it as cryptocurrency meets sports cards meets Ebay. These so-called “Top Shots” are digital collectibles that are based around actual NBA game actions such as dunks, assists and blocks. But the similarities stop there: They’re not just digital files that you need to open on your computer. Each Top Shot is listed with its own unique serial number and its own unique digital fingerprint — a piece of data unique to every transaction made over the internet. This fingerprint is basically like a highly sophisticated barcode for each Top Shot; it’s encrypted so you cannot fake it. And like cryptocurrency, these new collectibles are part of a larger cultural movement about transacting on the internet with ease.
This is the world of sports card trading on steroids. Except in this case, what makes them fun — and what makes them profitable — is that you can buy and then sell them for thousands of dollars more than you paid in a highly volatile and extremely speculative blockchain-based marketplace. Since this marketplace is backed on the blockchain, it allows instant and secure transactions across a decentralized, trustless network so that users can buy, sell and trade their favorite game highlights with their friends or anyone else on the internet. This forgoes the traditional pains of buying and selling trading cards such as having to deal with shipping costs, appraisals, high fees and fraud.
But that’s only the small picture.
NBA Top Shot aims to bring fans a whole new way to interact with each other, the players they love and their favorite teams. By allowing these collectibles to be bought, sold and traded on one of the world’s most secure and trusted peer-to-peer marketplaces — blockchain technology — NBA Top Shot brings sports card trading into the modern era. The blockchain means:
Each trade is transparent, visible to anyone in the entire world. If someone chooses to do so, they can easily track how any Top Shot has changed hands over time.
@ILOVEMATTYICE tells it best:
Imagine walking around with a hat and telling everyone Bron gave it to you. Would anyone believe you?
Now imagine owning an
@nba_topshot
that Bron gave you. Someone doesn’t believe you? Refer them to the
@flow_blockchain
transaction. Better yet — give it a badge.
How To Buy Top Shots?
NBA Top Shot drops moments in packs like sneaker drops. Packs with common moments can start from $9 to $14. Like sneaker drops, they are released in limited quantities at specific times. Also like sneaker drops, it’s super difficult to get your hands on a pack given the overwhelming demand. As well, a buy-and-trade marketplace has been set up to show all the Top Shots currently for sale by NBA fans, and by clicking “buy” you can purchase that clip and add it to your inventory of digital video clips. The value of each NBA digital clip is determined entirely by the market, and along with every purchase comes an invoice from your blockchain wallet showing that you own the specific clip purchased.
I know what you’re thinking.
Is this NBA Top Shot just a fad? Will prices come crashing down in the near future?
Truth is — I don’t know. I believe that series 2 common moments may gradually decline in value over time, especially as the minting of new moments continue to take place. I’m also skeptical about the future viability of trading these moments at such high prices. With the secondary market for trading cards being so new, I wonder if there’s a “tipping point” where sellers realize that their cards are worth only a fraction of what they thought they were worth. Supply and demand is important here, but I think something more fundamental is at work. We’re witnessing the creation of an entire new market segment right now and how it develops will be very interesting from where I sit.
