NBA Top Shot 2.0
A revolutionary redesign to what Sports NFTs actually are for their users and business
In the last post I wrote on how Dapper’s original product design for sports NFTs- tailored to its smaller (and less avid basketball watching) original audience of NFT-native whitelist users, and reliant on long periods of set curation, filling those sets with moments that had little inherent demand to satisfy the license criteria, and holding back rewards and incentives to compel demand where there was otherwise none- had put the Product-Market fit at odds with its current and potential customers, leading to a slow loss of users and value over time:
This article will then lay out the core product design for Sports NFTs 2.0 to be a better fundamental product-market fit and more sustainably able to generate engagement, demand, business revenue, and user value to hold.
The two main product features were missed in Dapper’s original design that would have accomplished this were Speed to Market and a User-Generated Economy.
The loss of speed to market when you need to take weeks to curate the best moments for fear they won’t be the best (‘The Ja Morant Problem’) should be obvious. But with the 1.0 design to fulfill the license agreement by stuffing packs with filler moments users didn’t say they wanted, then compelling people to collect them anyway, while limiting moments for star players to prevent dilution because of current utility model, they also put the product at odds with creating a User-Generated Economy.
The Failed Designs for a User-Generated Economy in a Model Reliant on Compelled Demand
Dapper’s first attempt at moments tied to demand was not in asking the userbase which moments they wanted to be minted, like they should have. It was telling them which moment the platform going to mint, then asking them to control how many got minted based on how many users hit a Buy button. AKA Open Editions.
Here a description of the problem in doing this from Eric “The Collectibles Guru” Whiteback:
And so more than 223,000 Dwyane Wade fandom moments were minted by users unaware and unable to control how many other users would claim that moment too. This is the big ‘M’ Moment most users still look at as the least valuable on the platform (you know, because of the whole supply and demand thing). It is also the little ‘m’ moment most users see Top Shot “jumped the shark” giving into greed and oversupplying the market… forgetting that it was ourselves, the users, that did minted that amount of supply. It was however a poorly set up system from Dapper.
Their next fundamental misunderstanding of creating a User-Generated Economy was the MSFE set and flash challenges: the game where again the more people that engaged, the less valuable the reward would be. This started the age of moment values tied to bottlenecks that would otherwise make no sense to a new user, which would immediately be diluted by the release of subsequent moments for that player. This required more and more layers of randomness to create ongoing value. Star players with lots of moments minted now began dropping in value (AKA ‘The Giannis MVP Set Problem’) and ceased to be pack hits anymore, leading to an intense user fear of utility value dilution that forces the business into player minting limits and falling back on long periods of curation to stay within those limits… no longer making the moments minted recent or relevant.
Their current attempt at a demand-driven economy and correcting the economic damage of flash challenges is FastBreak. In a positive, this attempts to drive demand toward the moments of players who are currently playing well and lining the stat sheets… but in capping utility demand at only one moment per player needed, it forgets about the supply side of the moment economy that drives values. The game’s design can’t effect the reduction of supply for star players because it wouldn’t make sense to force users to burn star players good for the game to receive a pack of random players; so it doesn’t ask them to. It also wouldn’t accomplish this goal by having users burn low-performing or retired players moments not good for the game (burn trade tickets for packs) because that still leaves the supply of star player’s moments too high; so it doesn’t ask users to do this either.
In every attempt to align its product’s supply toward where users have demand for new moments, Dapper has either: done it exactly backwards for moments users demand to be valuable, or left out half of the equation that would have made it work, or put in competing systems that undermine that goal.
The Goals for Product-Market Fit
So if we were going to start from the very beginning and fundamentally redesign how the product actually works for a more successful product-market fit that is better able to retain users and demand and moment values over time, what would the goals be for that product?:
-Immediacy, tied into what is happening in the NBA now
-Minting tied to moments users actually want
-Market reflects higher prices for more popular players and moments because users want them, instead of for utility bottlenecks
-New supply doesn’t aggravate holders of player’s previous moments
-Users being able to collect players and moments they want and feel rewarded for how they choose to spend
-Clear path to laddering up to encourage new user retention
-Clear path to user success through consistency in utility (confidence that if you buy a moment today, some arbitrary change or exclusion to its’ utility later will not wipe out its’ value)
-Scalable rewards from starting accounts to the very top spenders that doesn’t cap and limit demand
So what is this magic model for Sports NFTs 2.0 that fixes the original product-market fit mismatch AND allows for all these goals to be achieved AND capitalizes on the Speed to Market advantage AND creates an ongoing User-Generated Economy that generates consistent revenue and isn’t undermined by its user incentive structure AND allows for easy new user onboarding with a clear path to success laddering up?
I’ll start with a brief clip from one of Dapper’s early sales pitches for what Top Shot could be to help sum it up:
NBA Top Shot 2.0 User Activity Loops
I’m not a web designer and I don’t have access to their visual assets, but since a picture is worth 1,000 words let’s start there.
And since any good UX is reinforced by a very clear “what exactly do you do here?” UI, here is what that the user activity loops would look like in the Sports NFTs 2.0 model:
Looks very different, I know.
The new regular cadence each week of what NBA Top Shot actually is for a user would now go:
1 ) VOTE:
Each user gets to vote on one play per week that they want to become a moment. Winning moments will be minted the next week as:
-One Holo /99 for the moment voted #1 of the week (two to preserve packs being an option which you’ll pull, one to tell a better end of year Set story)
-One MGLE /399 for the moment voted #2 highest of the week
-Two Rare theme set moments /699 for those voted #3 and #4
-Three Common theme set moments /4000 for those voted #5–7
-Three Common base set moments /8000 for those voted #8–10
-Rookie Debut set TSDs and additional non-rookie debut moments are minted at Dapper’s discretion to include in common packs, one per week for 28 weeks of regular season
This makes the Holo set at the end of the year the 24 best moments of the season, not 24 different players’ hopefully best moments of the year. It tells a much better story of the year in the NBA. This likewise makes the MGLE set the 24 next best moments of the year. The remaining rare and common themed sets (Video Game Numbers, For the Win, Throwdowns, Hustle & Show, Extra Spice, Crunch Time) are similarly the best mid-tier moments of the year in that theme. Base commons are still moments people voted that they want.
The same can be done in the offseason for “Legacies” legendaries, “Run it Back” rares, and “Archive” commons.
Moments would now be minted as more scarce (or at all) because more users said they wanted them. Dapper would no longer need to compel those users into collecting something they don’t want for what they do anymore, so it doesn’t matter how many of that player wind up in a set at the end of year. Users may collect the entire set if they desire to for non-market effecting rewards like IP rights or the profile badge (which will have more significance in user loop section 7 below). Annual releases of moments just to satisfy the terms of the league and player association license are now done by minting them as player leaderboard rewards (section 5 below) in order to support that player’s economy instead of diluting the limited demand for them by flooding them into all packs as filler for users who likely don’t want them.
Currently Top Shot staff needs to go on X/Twitter to ask for input or explain its justification for minting decisions. This doesn’t need to be the case with a digital product:
Users voting for moments they want minted is a huge opportunity for Dapper to satisfy an unmet need of its target audience. It’s also clearly the biggest departure from what NBA Top Shot currently is for users. This is the revolutionary shift. But it is necessary due to the fundamental disconnect between what the product and its users want it to be (#NBATopShotThis) and how it actually works.
Making voting on the top plays of the week be a core part of the product accomplishes:
-Immediacy and speed to market
-Being a more relevant part of the NBA discussion because minting is tied to what just happened in the league (examples: playoff moments, LeBron record breaker, Steph record breaker) instead of releasing months later
-Users feeling they have “skin in the game” and creating a personal connection to the moments they vote for, even before they are minted, instead of being told what moments they are going to get
-Seeing how users are voting becomes a social aspect for the site that needs no moderators (but may want to be removed to prevent
-Engagement that does not rely on Dapper spending money on loss-leaders or diluting existing moment holders
-Able to utilize partner tie-in to NBA app videos (minus audio) to ease the speed to market push from curation team
-Minting directly tied to demand: no more complaints “who even wanted a Kyle Anderson legendary??” or “Why was this minted as the legendary when Luka’s assist of the year is buried as a base common?”
-No more duds in packs. Users will know if something is being minted its because some user out there said “I want that to be a moment” meaning there will be market demand for it outside prior ‘collect what you don’t want to earn what you do’ anti-pattern incentive models, meaning they’ll have more demand to buy new packs for Dapper’s revenue model
-Curation team is freed up from deciding which moments to mint and instead how to source and edit the best video to make those moments look the best they can
-Stars and popular moments will now automatically be the higher priced for a logical market because 1) more people voted that they wanted them as a moment (demand) and 2) they were minted to a more scarce tier and mint count (supply)
Most other parts of the sports NFT 2.0 design flow from this key change: minting what users say they actually want and for the most popular to be the most scarce.
2) CHURN:
a. Burn-to-earn leaderboards- burn leaderboard competition for 10% of all new moments, runs from Thursday to following Tuesday (Top Shot Tuesday)
-Individual burn leaderboard for all new players receiving moments (exception only for Top Shot debuts being released). No more exclusions for only giving burn leaderboards to current All-Stars.
-Allows users to compete by burning any previous moments from that player, at the tier of the reward or higher, ranked by cumulative average sale price of moments burned. No more only allowing burns of certain sets Dapper wants to prop up. No more excluding common moments from burn utility until they pile up unsellable at the floor: they get common-level burn leaderboards now.
More churn is absolutely required for this product to be long-term economically viable for users. And if it is not, then this is not long-term economically viable as a business either.
There seems to have been a debate early on between “the floor doesn’t matter, the true collectibles will always hold value” and “only the OGs and whales care about collectables (said using air quotes), it’s all about having a use for the floor- more trade ticket drops, cheap utility.” But both of those seem to have lost out. The overall market cap continues to fall year over year. And as Top Shot abandoned the floor because “commons are meant to be commons,” users stopped being able to sell the moments they pulled from packs to anyone, got frustrated assuming none of it was valuable anymore then, and left. Ceiling prices on those collectible grails have continued to tumble as well with the drop in users and the demand they bring.
The gift of digital collectibles over physical is that they don’t degrade or get lost over time. The curse of digital collectibles over physical is that they don’t degrade or get lost over time. Dapper can’t keep producing supply like you can for physical cards that are being churned naturally while expecting values to hold up. They have to work that churn into the system at scale:
Purposely excluding commons from being burned on leaderboards due to acknowledging there are too many commons to save, abandoning their economy, and forcing that supply reduction toward floor rares creates weird abrasion and utility gaps for users: burning a TSD common on a leaderboard for a new common makes no sense, but burning it for a new rare/legendary may. Those high-value commons however are excluded and not allowed any burn utility in the Series ‘23–24 model, even if the user wanted to.
Burn leaderboard position also must be switched back to position by value burned through reworking the calculation of TSS to it now being current average sale price (ASP) of moments being burned. See here for why.
Saving 10% of every new moment for burn leaderboards accomplishes many things that needed to be solved for with the user-demand driven minting of the Sports NFT 2.0 model:
- It retains 80% of every new moment that was voted into having a repeat moment minted, where opening a redemption window for repeats in sets does not
-It prevents set moments from splitting into mint counts beyond their tier (i.e. rare level commons, legendary level rares) making all previous series moments in that set collectors hold look worse by comparison
-The 10% limit on supply winnable via leaderboard ensures that competition makes it likely to consume more/better moments than crafting would as users jocky for position.
Subsequent votes for a player to be minted become less of a dilution risk to the game too because the system ensures:
1) Player is voted into minting
2) Burn leaderboard for their old moments at the tier are opened
3) Logic says burn the cheapest. Moments relatively less demanded, like high-mint count All-Star Game rares from S2 and S3 get burned… and these are the ones people would be buying when making a pure utility play. So each minting of player reduces those available for sale at the floor, raising the value of holding the game pieces even without playing. But…
4) But because competition for ASP burned is what ensures placement, some burned with be moments above the floor… improving player leaderboard position for those that lock since their higher ASP makes those moments more useful there.
5) Even if the same player gets voted into the set later in the series, #4 above says some of the moments voted into minting in the set this series will get burned for the new one, lowering the supply of the old one and increasing its price for better FastBreak scoring and leaderboard placement
All of these to say a shift to ASP as the basis of TSS, and regular 10% burn leaderboards for all newly minted moments at every tier, scoring by cumulative value burned from that player in any of their previous moments in that tier- removes the risk to Dapper in lost revenue from user-vote driven minting AND removes the fear of utility or value dilution on potential repeat mintings.
3) DROPS:
Pull packs of moments that just wrapped up their burn windows (not included in the pack for those where a redemption window was opened)
-The return of TSS gated drops for guaranteed-tier packs, but now tied to total current ASP (average sale price) value of all the moments the user holds. Gifted ASP does not count for gating purposes.
-Three available packs at the level of the common, rare, and legendary tiers
-Minimum ASP held required to reserve and successfully earn a rare or legendary, not getting lucky on a “Quick Hit” pack for cheap
-Common packs available for zero ASP to beginners and feature highly sought after Rookie Debuts even experienced users have demand for as well as the moments that round out the top 10 moments of the week that users have used their votes to say they want minted
The belief that commons are “worthless” is a direct result of Dapper’s decisions to 1) mint tons of those moments from every active player that no one wanted, and 2) make games that require users to have only one of each player when there are hundreds of thousands of commons available. Those both need to be gone, meaning commons will again have inherent demand and value to new users starting to ladder up.
Previous “Quick Rip” gamble packs removed any necessity for a user to build up the value of their collection (AKA supporting the market and the values of existing moments users are holding). With loot packs, the calculus for users becomes: spend a little more at a shot at something more scarce, 90% of users pull commons they didn’t want and were hoping not to pull, dump them on the marketplace to no one who wants them either, get frustrated at spending that extra money each time, give up and not come back. Or if the user pulls a rare or legendary, immediately flip it by undercutting the existing market since you got it for cheap and there is no penalty to never holding any moments for longer than you can navigate to the listing screen. Then repeat the gamble.
Dapper supposedly learned their lesson all the way back in March 2022, went back to “packs will be hard to come by” in Series 4, then somehow forgot those lessons a year and a half later for Series -23–24:
Drops need to support a greater platform strategy again. And that message to users needs to be: if you have not proven you can support the economy of moments Dapper is releasing by… actually holding onto moments, then you are currently at the level of common packs. And there would now be demand for common packs even from whales again because commons are now moments people have voted they want, instead of filler no one wanted. There are also still the coveted pack hits of Rookie Debuts. The question is which one you’ll pull and what serial. But if you want better tier moments that proved to be the most popular with users that week, you need to earn that right by supporting the marketplace economy (the thing that makes users happy holding moments here). There would now be a clear path to user success besides just getting lucky extracting value for cheap.
TSS rewarding older users’ overspend relative to current market value puts new users and any new spend at a disadvantage. The shift to calculating TSS by cumulative average sale price held (but not from being gifted) solves this.
4) MARKETPLACE HIGHLIGHT:
The new Marketplace Highlight seeks to:
-Carry over the positive, automated aspects of the app to mobile and desktop like Top 25 wishlisted Moments of the week, Top 25 watched Moments of the week, Top marketplace purchases of the week
-Provide a guided search for new users to discover moments the way they may want to: by tier, by badges, by player name, by team, by set, etc.
After users have followed the activity loop stages of vote, churn, and pull packs, the next logical place to point users to is the marketplace of those moments that just released and existing ones out there. “Didn’t get a pack or want to gain access to better packs in the future? Want to prepare for your favorite player’s leaderboard? Hit the marketplace.”
Speaking of supporting that marketplace, what are those moments a new user should be looking at? What is new on the market or popular? Shouldn’t users be directed toward these things? These are the things the app does well, but the desktop team is seemingly unaware of. They need to be front and center driving positive economic behavior, not buried in a menu or completely missing from the desktop and mobile interface.
Did you know the Marketplace view below currently exists on the Top Shot site? It’s an orphaned page, meaning no other page links to it:
The automation of the app with the visuals and user-driven moment discovery drives the desired user activity of buying moments that support the economy, keeping existing users happy that their values aren’t constantly heading down. And it does this in a way where the buyer feels like the platform helps them collect the way they want to collect instead of driving them and rewarding them to collect moments they otherwise wouldn’t want and won’t enjoy holding.
6) PLAY FASTBREAK:
Newly minted moments need to have 10% held back for burning leaderboard rewards, 80% sold in guaranteed tier packs, and the other 10% hold back for FastBreak.
This makes FastBreak rewards recently popular moments, which also increases the likelihood of them being moments from players good for the game.
Rewards in this model earned every day now through competing for the top scores (with player tiebreaker by ASP held in the player), engaging a larger amount of users in the long run, earning better rewards to those good at the game than luck would, and subtly reinforcing the market economy without forcing it. See this post about the tweaks FastBreak needs in Series ‘24–’25 to be both more engaging and support the long-term collector economy instead of diluting it.
Recurring burn leaderboards then work to consume floor moments at each tier, so players repeatedly being voted in for new mints also work to help the game’s economy.
Users are also unlikely to be annoyed holding ASP value in a player who retires, making them no longer good game pieces, because the the Sports NFT 2.0 model affords them offseason utility for new player locking leaderboards or burn leaderboards when user-driven minting demand creates this utility for retired players.
6) LOCKING:
Weekly player locking leaderboard rewards of 10 new players each week (mirroring base set), range of stars to bench players, retired players in offseason.
-Accessible threshold for common level (2000? 1500?) moment rewards
-Multiple parallels modeled after S4 base set to scale incentive for placing higher based on current cumulative average sale price of all moments locked in that player
-Sits outside burn-to-earn process so separate repurposed “Spotlight” set
Earlier why did I address the impact of Dapper’s original license with the NBA and NBAPA? Because based on their actions the last the last 5 years that license seems to logically have stipulated that Dapper release a moment of each active player each series so that player can earn their cut of the transaction fee revenue; it likely did not stipulate however that every player’s moment had to be released in packs. So release those moments the license requires here as an ongoing way to also churn that player’s supply and preserve the value of each player’s moment supply, and save what is minting to packs for the moments people actually want.
Locking is also the less destructive activity than burning, missing out lets the person retain their moments, making it more appropriate sell as the next step from new user to intermediate. Burning would then be the more advanced user activity due to its destructive nature.
Locking leaderboard rewards, the way they’re done in Series ’23–24, also potentially rewards lapsed users and furthers the belief that locking is “only for OGs and whales”. S23–24 utility had the balance backwards: rewarding only the top few (and lucky) users for locking, turning 90% of users off from engaging in the MP+ behavior at all.
7) SOCIAL:
a. Profile Customization-
-Pins like a “Trophy Case”
-Showcases (maybe autoplay on profile)
-Accomplishments like sets completed, leaderboard positions, etc
b. Friends You Follow (no reason to curate your profile if we’re not going to look at each other’s)
c. Activity Feed- Timeline of all blockchain activity (listings, burnings, leaderboard locking, pack pulls, marketplace buys, etc) from users you chose to follow
Have a user you look up to? See what moments they’re collecting
Have a user who’s always sniping moments you want? See what they’re up to as they do it
Want to run or be part of a community (team fans, set holders, etc)? Interact with them on the actual platform they’re all using to do it.
Become actual internet friends with another Top Shot user? Follow along with their pulls and purchases to congratulate them
*Important* No chat function means no harassment potential, which means no moderator effort needed
The groundwork for including this data onto our Overview pages has begun, but on the level of data that is possible and not in connecting us together in it. We should see what users we follow are burning for leaderboards, what they’re making offers on, what they’re listing, what they’re locking. This is where the FOMO and the market discovery and the competition begins:
You can’t show off your accomplishments if there’s no one else looking at what you’ve accomplished. Making users go to X/Twitter as the place to show off “look at this cool thing I’ve done!” because it isn’t integrated into the product itself is a huge missed opportunity.
This is the logical place for Top Shot to actually use that data to drive user- generated engagement with three new features:
1) Updated User Overview page with your brags (pinned moments, completed sets, leaderboard placement)
2) Ability to follow other users
3) Activity Feed of those user’s activity while they see yours
This is also where set collecting can become the positive accomplishment for an intrinsic reward that it should be, instead of the prior incentive-warping system of using explicit rewards to compel users to collect what they don’t want, which was necessitated by minting and trying to sell lots of moments in packs that no one otherwise wanted. Sets also would now tell a much more interesting story of collecting the moments of the season that users deemed the ones they wanted the most, instead of what was put there because of the way Dapper devised to fulfill the license with the league and player’s association.
8) RESET:
-Maybe a day or two in between for Dapper operations teams to reset and to let moments breathe in the market, then start over with a batch of new top plays of the week up for votes with the previous week’s advancing to the next stage.
How Could Top Shot Market Itself With This Model:
The way Dapper is currently marketing NBA Top Shot and NFL All Day is not landing. They are needing to give away Dapper Balance with new user packs, buy NBA Finals tickets to randomly give away with packs, and all kinds of other loss leaders. But those new users are still not joining because the story Dapper is marketing on what Top Shot is isn’t connecting. But through the benefit of being digital and the benefit of its license for highlight videos, Dapper has the potential with this new model to be:
“Collect the moments that matter in NBA culture, before anywhere else”
… before the dinosaur of print run sports cards can catch up. Plus, Top Shot would now actually follow the web3 ethos of being a democratic, gated community. This is finally minting to demand the way it always should have been: vote for your favorite moment and the most popular will get minted as the most scarce, not the least scarce.
“Connect with other fans the way only blockchain can provide”
Why use a blockchain platform at all? Wouldn’t a secure database do the same thing? The benefit of blockchain is transparency; they should use it:
A) Trophy Case, Friend Lists, Activity Feeds, Profile Badges for 🔥/🔒 leaderboard rewards earned and current placement (MP+ behaviors)
B) Friend Follow Lists
C) Activity Feeds like LiveToken’s activity list where you can see all their activity and accomplishments and trophy case and they can see yours
This accomplishes the goal of “how can we drive ongoing transaction revenue when people aren’t quite sure what to collect?” that Dapper originally tried to solve through Set Challenges and Flash Challenges, but in a way that is non-compelled so users feel more in control… and thus more satisfied to continue collecting here.
It is also more automated and sustainable- it doesn’t require paying resources to pour over data and see which moments they need to prop up and where there are bottlenecks. It is created by a developer once, published, and the users generate the content in perpetuity. This is what made Facebook and Twitter and all the web 2.0 companies such effective destinations and revenue generators- user generated content.
This is a long article, so thanks for sticking with it! But there is a lot that would be new here and I found it important to explain the rationale for the changes so the overarching strategy is not misunderstood. A lot of work went into designing this model… but also more writing.
Take a break, decompress, and read the supplemental companion piece here for:
- Additional Weird Things About Top Shot the Sports NFT 2.0 Model Solves
- Embracing Change and Addressing Any Potential Concerns
Also the math and management strategies that make it work without risking revenue lost to repeat player votes.
In Closing
Maybe this whole thing you’ve just read has been one long (but hopefully fun to imagine) alternate reality for NBA Top Shot or NFL All Day, and the product will continue on with its current core design whether it really makes sense for users or not, and following along the same market cap trend until there is no market left. But I certainly hope not.
I fundamentally believe in the untapped potential here and that the sports NFT 2.0 product design outlined here would lead to a far more healthy secondary economy, higher revenue for Dapper, happier more satisfied users, and long-term user growth.
But we’ll see.
