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The boom of NBA Top Shot is due to the huge volumes and the main newspapers (NPR and Forbes) that have made them great publicity. The thing I'm wondering is: how sustainable is this model? Basically NBA Top Shot, for the moment, does not allow you to earn but it is only collectible cards (digital). Surely NBA Top Shot took advantage of people's irrational exuberance for sports, collectibles, and financial speculation. Basically, NBA gaming videos packaged as collectible "Moments", each coined on the blockchain in limited supply, was a nice insight into taking advantage of the NFT boom.
Dapper Labs, the creator of Top Shop, encourages collectors to purchase these Moments and assemble their favorites in a variety of ways. You can collect Moments from your favorite players, favorite teams, highlights, or strive to collect complete sets. You can showcase your favorite moments in "showcases" and you can collect specific cards to complete "challenges" that offer rewards for completion.
You can purchase Moments in two ways. The cheapest way is to buy a "package". Graphically, they are intended to simulate the experience of going to your local collectible store and purchasing a trading card pack. Each package includes approximately five "Moments" chosen at random from the offers. Package prices range from $ 9 for a basic set to over $ 200 for a premium or rare set.
The relaunch of the packs decreases over time and this makes these Moments increasingly rarer. To purchase them, customers must meet certain requirements (already have a certain number of "Moments" in their collection) and enter a "waiting room" where they will be assigned a "queue" number. If you are lucky enough to receive fewer than the number of packages available, you are offered the option to purchase a package when it's your turn. Imagine buying an investment product that is almost guaranteed to be more valuable than your initial investment within minutes of that investment.
Secondly, you can purchase a package through the Marketplace. Buying and selling is a key feature of NBA Top Shop and allows you to purchase individual Moments from other collectors. The Marketplace is decentralized and works according to the principles of supply / demand. Owners can set the price they want. Dapper makes his money by charging a 5% commission on all trades. "Common" moments have runs of up to 60,000 and can go as low as a few dollars. The "Rare", "Ultimate" and "Legendary" cards, with much smaller runs, can cost hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. The other novelty was the introduction of collectible cards also from the WNBA.
How sustainable is such a model? Surely this type of cards can acquire value over time, if in a limited edition. Many (real) trading card manufacturers went out of business because they flooded the market trying to satisfy demand, at the expense of the value of the cards already in circulation. A bubble has burst and many cards have become worthless.
The bubble is something NBA Top Shot seems determined to avoid. The whole experiment is currently in beta at the moment, as they devise a way to satisfy demand but still satisfy collectors. The entire business model relies on their ability to limit the number of moments in circulation to maintain value.
To meet demand, Top Shot recently announced that the size of the editions would increase, mainly due to their "base set". The number of packs minted and sold in drop events has also increased. In reality, the site Evaluate Market shows a decrease in volumes compared to 1 year ago, but the real value is probably the current one. They have probably been overpriced. I personally own several Moments but I hope that the team will invent a "play to earn" or perhaps the launch of a token, otherwise I am convinced that sooner or later the bubble will burst.
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