This Week on NBA Top Shot: All-Star Weekend and Market Woes
by Chris Otis
2/27/2022
Welcome back to This Week on NBA Top Shot, a weekly blog from Otis Top Shot and your friends here at MomentRanks that dives into essential NBA Top Shot news and updates over the last week. Pack drops, Flash Challenges, marketplace insights, noteworthy sales, community news — we’ve got you covered on all of it and more.
Everything that happens on Top Shot can be a lot to keep up with — but you’ll be able to find all of the latest Top Shot news and updates here every week. This week didn’t go as planned for Top Shot, but All-Star Weekend brought some new excitement to the NBA NFTs. Let’s take a look at what happened.
tl;dr: This Week on NBA Top Shot
This week started with a ton of potential. Despite some very real problems persisting, a presence at All-Star Weekend and a new marketing partnership with Jalen Green — centered around the star rookie’s participation in the Dunk Contest — with a special free airdrop to collectors, aimed to lift the spirits of the community and, more importantly, help the platform reach thousands of new curious eyes.
Unfortunately, the culmination of the Top Shot × Jalen Green Dunk Contest partnership was nothing short of disaster, with Green only briefly wearing a chain featuring his Top Shot Debut Moment around his neck, taking it off before the dunk attempts and giving it to NBA legend Isaiah Thomas. Then he seemingly forgot how to dunk.
Even more disappointing was the fact that Dwyane Wade, who was featured in a marketing promotion with Top Shot just four months ago and was one of the TV announcers for the event, inexplicably had no idea what was going on and wound up referring to some mysterious partnership with Coinbase instead of Top Shot.
The week’s lone pack drop did go off without a hitch. But continued negative sentiment surrounding the experimental new drop style and the opening of the NFL All Day marketplace, combined with the recent downwards momentum of the past couple of weeks caused the most significant dip the Top Shot market has seen in quite some time.
Let’s take a deeper look.
Top Shot Market Update
I sincerely wish I had better news to share, but the Top Shot market, which had been showing signs of potential issues over the past couple of weeks, has sharply declined in the past couple of days.
There are several likely causes for this, such as the opening of the NFL All Day marketplace and the very poor community sentiment about the new lootbox-style pack drops that Top Shot has been experimenting with, but it’s likely that this is an amalgamation of several factors rather than being due to any singular issue.
As someone who is taking a very long-term approach to collecting on Top Shot, I’m trying my best to zoom out past the current state of my account value and continue thinking in the long-term, and, while I certainly won’t sugarcoat anything, I’ll do my best to highlight what makes me optimistic below in the marketplace metrics section.
Top Shot Marketplace Metrics
Both the MR100 and Total Market Cap metrics show sharp drops in recent days, with the MR100 sitting around 1,750 and Total Market Cap at around $630 million.
I’ve chosen to highlight the six-month trend for the Total Market Cap below to highlight just how drastic this drop is. While it’s important to keep in mind that the formula MomentRanks uses to calculate Total Market Cap recently changed, negatively impacting our market cap, this precipitous drop has still taken the metric below the previous six month low very quickly.
What does make me optimistic, however, is how quickly things have changed in the past. Note the relative low-point in mid-December that rapidly turned into a bull run. This community has a very short memory, so it doesn’t take much to get the positive momentum flowing back in the other direction again if things start going more smoothly.
As I noted last week, the 24-hour transactions and unique buyers & sellers metrics continue to show similar patterns to what was seen over the past month or so. However, for the first time ever, unique buyers briefly jumped sellers during the All-Star Weekend marketing initiatives.
The real difference here is that the 24-hour sales volume continues to be significantly lower than it had been previously.
This can at least be somewhat explained by the fact that the NFL All Day Marketplace has pulled Dapper wallet funds away from the Top Shot ecosystem. One has to wonder just how much an effect that is having on the market in comparison to other issues. It’s also interested to see if the two platforms will continue to have this negative effect on each other before they can co-exist as positive engines of growth for the Dapper Labs ecosystem.
Biggest Top Shot Sales
For the second week running, a cute_hamster6263 purchase tops our list of the week’s biggest sales, with his $44,999 purchase of a Series 3 LeBron James Deck the Hoops Moment dwarfing the rest of the competition.
Rounding out the list this week were Legendary Moments from Vince Carter and Steph Curry, a Series 1 LeBron James MGLE, and yet another Series 1 Kevin Durant Run It Back, which continues to be one of the most sought-after top-tier Moments on the platform.
Top Shot Pack Drops This Week
After a parade of packs last week, this week only saw one drop occur, though it did feature the first of two waves of Moments from the 2022 NBA All-Star Game.
NBA All-Star Packs (Release 3)
Release 3 of the NBA All-Star Packs once again utilized the divisive Standard and Elite lootbox-style packs that have been featured throughout the month of February. It is sort of nice that the discussions have shifted to whether or not these hybrid packs are worth purchasing at all, whether than wondering if the randomizer is working or not.
Full details of the Elite and Standard Pack contents can be found here and here, but one of the big changes for this drop was that the barrier to entry for the Elite Packs was lowered to 4,000 Collector Score (including drop bonus) from 9,000 in the previous drop. Top Shot did promise to experiment with these packs all month, and it seems they took advantage of the much larger supply of Rare Moments available in this drop to do just that.
In addition, these Elite Packs featured the best odds at landing a Rare Moment yet, which was also true for the Standard Packs, despite the fact that the overall odds of pulling anything other than a fourth Base Set Moment did decrease in those packs.
Now, regardless of any of the very valid discussions taking place about the long-term viability and fairness of this experimental new pack drop style, the Moments contained in these packs were awesome, and are worth taking a second look at.
These packs featured seven of the final eight Rising Stars Common LE Moments, including this incredibly acrobatic and improvisational finish from Jalen Green.
Also included were the first 10 Rare 2022 NBA All-Star Game Moments, highlighted by Ja Morant’s 360 slam on an alley-oop from Trae Young, and five more Legendary NBA All-Star Classics Moments, led by Tracy McGrady bringing the house down at the 2000 NBA Dunk Contest.
This Week in Top Shot Challenges
If there’s one thing that’s been consistent in the world of Top Shot recently, it’s that there are so many Showcase Challenges going on at any given time that it’s becoming difficult to keep up. Perhaps a post about challenge fatigue will be in order sometime soon, but for now, let’s recap what went down this week.
Traditional Showcase Challenges
Regarding the Traditional Showcase Challenges, no less than nine Challenges either finished up or went live this week across four different sets.
Starting with the Rising Stars Set, the challenge for this awesome Evan Mobley block finished early on in the week with a mint count of 9,077. Next up for that set is Rising Stars S3 Challenge 3, which ends on March 1 and features LaMelo Ball.
Two Series 3 MGLE Challenges also ended this week, with a sweet Jaylen Brown assist minted to just 285, and an acrobatic finish from Giannis winding up with a mint count of 364.
For the Legendary NBA All-Star Classics Set, the first challenge reward was this iconic Allen Iverson Moment from the 2000 NBA All-Star Game, where some stellar teamwork leads to AI finishing in the shadow of both Tim Duncan and Shaq. This special Moment became one of the scarcest on the entire platform after just 27 users completed the challenge.
Speaking of Shaq and AI, the reward for NBA All-Star Classics Challenge 2 will feature a Moment of the Big Diesel violently swatting Iverson’s layup attempt off the backboard.
Finally, 2022 All-Star Game Challenge 1 has also gone live, with LeBron’s absurd game-winning fadeaway as the reward.
Flash Challenges
Anyone who was hoping that Top Shot would find a way to keep everyone’s attention during the All-Star Festivities last weekend was surely not disappointed, with Flash Challenges launching for every major event of All-Star Weekend, including a two-tiered challenge for the All-Star Game itself.
Rewards included MSFE Moments from Miles Bridges, Tyrese Maxey, Kyrie Irving, Devin Booker, and Darius Garland.
Once the second half of the NBA season began towards the end of this week, the Flash Challenges resumed as well, including Bounding Back, which featured a Karl-Anthony Towns MSFE Moment as a reward, and Drain and Defend, which ran through the weekend.
Miscellaneous Top Shot Updates
- Per the above tweet, the next drop will feature the same Standard and Elite Packs seen throughout February before Top Shot will go through the data and assess the results.
- Top Shot unveiled a new pack listings page which replaces the spreadsheet with a much more visually appealing option.
- Beloved community member turned Top Shot content guru Packrip Ewing published this blog about the NBA All-Star Classics Legendary Set that alludes to future bottleneck smashing:
- Across the Dapperverse, NFL All Day saw the opening of its marketplace, and also dropped some of the Week 13 Packs that had been held back from earlier in the closed beta.
The Week Ahead on Top Shot
Well, we know from above that the final NBA All-Star themed packs will be coming this Thursday, but the packs will be flowing even before then with the fourth batch of Series 1 Reserve Packs dropping on Monday, February 28.
500 packs will be available for purchase at the same cost of 350 Trade Tickets as the previous three batches.
Beyond that, I expect this next week to be a pretty quiet one as Top Shot begin analyzing the data from the past month and start plotting their next steps. There will surely be the near-nightly Flash Challenges we’ve grown accustomed to, but I wouldn’t expect much otherwise.
That’s all for this week everyone, thanks for reading and I’ll see you all back here next Sunday!
And remember, if these challenging times have you stressed out or feeling down, be it from Top Shot or the current state of the world, don’t be afraid to unplug for awhile or to reach out to someone to talk. My DMs are always open.