TEN MILLION pesos.
If we want to be exact, it's actually P10,101,520.00, if we go by Google’s foreign exchange conversion rates as of yesterday. That's how much in pesos an NBA Top Shot Moment was recently sold for. But what in the world is NBA Top Shot and why have they now sold over 230 million US dollars (over 11 billion pesos) of these Moments? Let’s break it down.
At its core, NBA Top Shot Moments is the modern, digital-age equivalent of the basketball card. (That’s not to say that the good ol’ physical NBA card is dead; just look at this $4.6 million sale of a Luka Doncic card). The process is largely the same: you buy a pack of Top Shot Moments, open it, and you become the owner of a handful of Moments.
But instead of owning physical cards, what you now have is a collection of curated video highlights, all officially licensed by the NBA, that all live inside your digital account. And just like NBA cards, you can hold on to these Moments for your personal collection or decide to trade them with other Top Shot collectors... which is where the serious money changes hands.
While Top Shot Moments packs can go for as cheap as $9 each, individual Moments in the marketplace can fetch anywhere from $4,000 for a Steph Curry assist to $100,000 for a Zion Williamson block to the record-setting $208,000 for a Lebron James dunk. And unlike the secondary card market, the NBA (and Dapper Labs who the NBA has partnered with for this venture) earns for every transaction made. This is obviously a very appealing scene for the league.
To understand this phenomenon a little bit more, we need to drop a technical term: NFTs or non-fungible tokens.
Top Shot Moments are NFTs which, without going into too much detail, are simply digital assets that are unique and cannot be replicated. So when you purchase a Moment, you own that Moment or video highlight.
Sure, others can watch the same video highlight on YouTube but think of it this way: you can take photos of the Mona Lisa or buy prints of it to hang at home but you still won’t own the Mona Lisa.
It’s this NFT structure that gives NBA Top Shot Moments its rarity and value, and all of this resides in a database of transactions and assets, known as a blockchain, which is also how things like bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies operate (though these cryptocurrencies are not NFTs).
It sounds way more complicated than it is and the actual process of getting started is really not that hard. The real challenges we found were in purchasing a pack, since they sell out extremely fast (there were 200,000 people in line for the last pack of which only 10,000 were released), as well as withdrawing your money, since that requires having either a US bank account or, for us here in the Philippines, having a crypto wallet.
Given how we interact nowadays, NBA Top Shot actually makes a lot of sense. You only have to get over the fact that what you’re buying are essentially lines of code that you will never be able to touch. This leap in ownership logic shouldn’t be that hard if you’ve already convinced yourself that pieces of cardboard with player photos and stats are worth a lot. NBA Top Shot has successfully transferred the essence of NBA card collecting and trading to the digital space without the hassle of having cards graded for quality, worrying about creases, and having to sift through fake sellers and buyers, among other things.
That is why they’ve sold as much as they have and why we feel like NBA Top Shot is the next big thing in sports collectibles, if it already isn’t. And if more players get into it like Terrence Ross and Terry Rozier have, and should they make monetary transactions easier for people not in the US, then we won’t be surprised if the digital collectible market rivals that of the physical one peso for peso.
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