Surpassing CryptoKitties and Decentraland
NBA Top Shot has become the largest NFT market by sales as it generated over $50M in total marketplace transactions after announcing the project in July 2019 and going live in late 2020.
For comparison, CryptoKitties, which launched in 2017, has just over $38M in all-time sales, while Decentraland, which has the highest all-time volume on nonfungible.com, has $40M in total sales since its 2017 launch.
The NFT digital collectibles market has been erupting lately, but NBA Top Shot is pulling out into a league of its own, overtaking the sector’s previous heavyweights CryptoKitties and Decentraland.
Recent transaction peaks make the peaks observed in late 2020 seem insignificant now. NBA Top Shots has catapulted itself past both Decentraland and CryptoKitties in 2021. Furthermore, it has achieved this in under 6 months. It is a testament to week on week growth in the NFT and digital collectibles sector where NFT creations are selling for exorbitant amounts.
NBA Top Shot card packs have been selling out in minutes and drawing the attention of influencers and major actors in the crypto space. In a recent Twitter thread, angel investor Romeen Sheeth called the demand for NBA Top Shot “insane” and said that with $30M worth of sales over the past 30 days, they’re “on pace to be the fastest-growing marketplace ever.”
To understand in more detail what drives the price of these digital collectibles DappRadar recently carried out a deeper analysis of the properties of NBA Top Shot cards and how owners and prospective buyers should better value them.
Using the example of two LeBron James highlights from the report can help explain further. The floor price for the release of Series 1 was $60,000 while series 2 could be bought for $29,000. The top sale of a Series 1 highlight was sold for $79,455 while Series 2 sold for just $39,999. Meaning that almost immediately after the initial sale the cards appreciated by around 30% based mostly on their series and scarcity.
Right place, right time
It can be argued that the concept of NBA Top Shot has more mass appeal than Decentraland or CryptoKitties and that launching right at the same time as the basketball season kicked off in the USA was a smart move to capitalize on peak interest.
Moreover, it can be argued that it is not the style or type of collectible on offer here but simply the fact that we are now three years ahead of the aforementioned releases of CryptoKitties and Decentraland – the industry appears to be ready to take notice.
As Inventors and retail users start to look for different assets as a store of value it is becoming more obvious that NFTs can present such an opportunity.
What is NBA Top Shot?
The NBA, NBPA, and Dapper Labs teamed up to create NBA Top Shot, a new collectible game running on the Flow blockchain. In NBA Top Shot players collect jaw-dropping plays and unforgettable highlights as digital collectibles that fans and players can own forever.