In early October, blockchain startup Dapper Labs opened its NBA Top Shot collectibles app to consumers worldwide. Less than five months later, cumulative sales have topped $123 million for the blockchain collectibles, including $59 million from 67,000 users within the last week. Less than $6 million was bought through direct purchases of digital basketball collectibles, with the balance traded through the secondary marketplace. We estimate that Dapper’s revenues from this are $12 to $13 million.
Update: Five days after this article was published the cumulative transaction figure was $228 million, with $149 million in the last seven days.
NBA Top Shot targets several types of consumers through a single app interface, including traditional card collectors, memorabilia traders, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, fantasy sports players, and even the sports betting crowd. It’s one of the highest-profile dApps to target mainstream rather than purely cryptocurrency audiences. That’s a fascinating challenge. A key reason for aiming at this broad audience is because the collectibles market is small, as we show later.
But what is NBA Top Shot? It sells packs of Moments – often five of them – which are video clips of basketball plays with animations. Much like physical cards, users won’t know what’s in the pack before they open it. Each Moment has a nonfungible token (NFT), which is unique to that specific Moment. With an NFT when a Moment is traded, its authenticity can be proven. And without the need to send physical memorabilia, the transfer is very quick. The NFT token standard was first created by Dapper Labs through its success with the CryptoKitties app back in 2017.
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