When NBA Top Shot launched a little over a year ago, “web3” and “NFT” were barely blips on the radar. Together we brought NFTs into the mainstream and charted a new course in sports fandom.
But the job is just getting started. Here’s a behind the scenes look at our team’s top priorities for 2022 as we continue our journey to bring Top Shot to millions of NBA fans. Please note that the following does not include any mention of marketing initiatives, IRL experiences or future set details. This blog, rather, will share more perspective about economy-focused product features we’re building and where our priorities stand in that regard for the year ahead.
Let’s jump into it:
Following up on our Content Roadmap from the beginning of Series 3 in October, we are setting strict limits on Legendaries going forward: in Series 3 (2021-22), no more than 10,000 total Legendary Moment™ NFTs will be sold in packs, with no individual Legendary Moment™ minted to an Edition Size greater than 99.
The first Legendary pack drop of the 2021-22 season will be Deck The Hoops: 2010s, easily one of the best NBA Top Shot drops ever. On the same day, we’ll be dropping our first Rare packs of the 2021-22 season. Both are seminal sets coming at a historic time for Top Shot and the NBA.
Collect what you love –– and what you believe in long-term. We’re doubling down on this mantra in the new year with new systems to reward collectors primarily based on their spend.
If you want to stack 1,000 Cody Zeller Moments, go ahead and do that. If you want to scoop up all the greatest players in the rarest of tiers, you can do that too. Rewards in Top Shot will scale with how much you engage –– no matter how you choose to.
Fans can also expect to see even more targeted airdrops of packs and other rewards, especially for full sets and, of course, Marketplace engagement.
Our recent updates to Challenges have been a huge hit. In 2022, you can look forward to new types of Challenges at a higher frequency, dynamic degrees of difficulty throughout the week, different kinds of prizes and even more ways to bring you closer to the NBA.
NBA Top Shot is a global marketplace, which means it benefits from having all the necessary features for price discovery and connectivity between fans.
We’ve heard you loud and clear: you need to be able to hunt for what you want on your terms. A bidding feature that provides additional market transparency as well as reduced friction for price discovery is a top priority for the NBA Top Shot and Dapper teams in 2022. Bids will create more transaction velocity for Top Shot Moments and increase Marketplace match-making. We will share more details on this feature as soon as possible.
Thanks to our friends at LiveToken, we are excited to share Favorite Team Leaderboards with the community. These leaderboards will help fans compete with each other to show off their passion. Teams want to know who their biggest fans are, and there’s incredible untapped potential for competition and loyalty rewards here – from merch to on court experiences, and everything in between.
Ever find yourself obsessively checking and rechecking a Moment in the Marketplace regularly? Well, good news. This week, the first version of a “Watchlist” feature rolled out to help you better track the Moments you have your eye on.
There’s no denying that our community members like to flex their achievements. After rolling out the “Set Completion Badges” on profiles, the response reinforced our need to give fans more personalizations and easier ways to organize what they own.
Putting your Top Shot Moments at the center of your metaverse persona is an important opportunity to provide utility to the rarest and most highly sought-after Moments on the platform. Fans should be able to flex their accounts everywhere they go, from social networks to metaverse worlds.
Pack drops are always an exciting time. There's nothing like queueing up with thousands of other collectors, hoping to snag a pack and sharing that experience together. We regularly see Queues that can reach collector numbers into the six figures. Next year, we expect even larger turnout and, to meet that, accelerating performance has been a top priority for us.
We have made a number of important technical improvements over the past several weeks and will be testing greater throughput in upcoming drops, preparing for growth in 2022 and beyond.
We all remember what it was like to first sign up to NBA Top Shot. The excitement of ripping open your first pack, browsing for your first Moment, reading the collectible details. It’s exciting, there is truly nothing like it. But, it can come with a big learning curve – terms or processes like Moment tiers, minting, blockchain, NFT wallet, identity verification, etc. can be daunting to new collectors.
We have a series of NBA Top Shot improvements aimed at first-timers as well as folks coming back day after day, enabling you to rip packs and trade on the Marketplace in a way that respects scarcity limits and maintains a healthy dynamic between all parts of the community.
We’re always learning, and as such, our roadmaps can and do change. To keep you informed, we plan on putting out updates to this blog on a quarterly basis. We consider it a good thing for our biggest fans to get to know where our collective heads are at, what is getting prioritized and how the big things you want to see are being addressed.
This list is not fully comprehensive, as there are several other exciting initiatives we are working on but aren’t quite ready to share.
We hope that everything you read above speaks to you. We are here for the long haul, and the plans outlined above will help us continue to lay our foundation for decades to come.
And one more thing: to celebrate the holiday season, we are proud to announce a one-time gift back event happening this weekend. For existing fans, we’re dropping Dapper Balance back as a huge THANK YOU. We took a snapshot of all accounts on Wednesday, Dec 15, 2021 and will be gifting 5% of your all-time net spend on the Marketplace back to you directly in the form of Dapper credit.* Stay tuned for a further update this weekend.
*Net Marketplace Spend is the amount of all Marketplace purchases minus the amount of all Marketplace sales (after 5% Marketplace fee).
For fans that are just learning about Top Shot for the first time, the holidays are the best time to start building your collection too:
Any account created between the start of the NBA Season (October 19th) and the end of the year (December 31st) that has completed identity verification and completes any two Challenges between today and the end of the year will be awarded $100 in Dapper Balance in early January to spend on packs or in the Marketplace. Click here to initiate your Identity Check.
* Our Christmas Day Flash Challenges, which run until Jan. 3, will count towards the $100 Holiday Offer.
Onward and upward!
