M○C△ Confessional: I'm Hopelessly In Love with NBATopshot
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Okay, so we’re doing this again, and today it’s gonna be a doozy. I am cautious, sweating, and slowly accepting that today I’ll be entering the proverbial lion’s den in another edition of
Let’s start at the beginning. My beginning. Early 2021, January or February, the last few months of true pandemic-era American lockdown before vaccines became available to the populace and some semblance of normalcy was restored. I imagine these were memorable days no matter one’s geography, but in the US specifically, this was an era interwoven with stimulus checks (stimmies), Dogecoin booms, and Gamestop Stock Short Squeezes, second waves and doomscrolling and a stubborn, frigid winter.
What was I doing at this time? Watching basketball, mainly. Going on lots of long walks. Cold-calling the citizens of Massachusetts about Covid exposure on behalf of the state government. And after my good friend Jake told me over the phone or something about this little-known cryptocurrency he’d heard about —something called Solano, or Solaner, no no, that’s not right, oh yes, I remember now: Solana, it was Solana; have you heard of it?— I was hounding after the same quick-riches that had fallen from the sky for Shiba-Inu enthusiasts and retail traders. I would not miss my next chance when it came.
And then it came.
I can find the exact moment for you: February 28th, 2021 at 3:50pm EST. I must have come across the concept a few days earlier and delayed my participation for some reason. I’m not sure why this was the perfect time to buy-in (perhaps you needed to own one of these things in order to qualify for future releases) but at aforementioned moment, February 28th, 2021 at 3:50pm EST, I —Max Cohen, who would just a few short years later go on to become, by sheer word-count alone, one of the most prolific chroniclers of crypto art culture alive— spent 167 United States Dollars on my first-ever NFT:
That’s right, my friend, you’re looking at a Kawhi Leonard NBATopshot Moment, a 3 Pointer on Jan 10 2021, from Base Set (Series 2), Common Moment, Serial Number #10981/14671.
This was my first NFT, an NBATopshot card.
I will now allow you a few moments to chuckle quietly to yourself.
Oh, you thought THAT was funny? Check THIS out:
This Evaluate.xyz encapsulation of my Topshot account (@Cohen) reveals that I am in the top 1% of all Topshot collectors, number 7,896 out of more than 1.5 million accounts. I own 850 different Topshot NFTs, or “moments” as they’re called. And you want to know the dirtiest secret of all?
I love Topshot. Is that confessional enough for you? I was hooked even before I acquired that silly Kawhi Leonard card. No wonder I spent the next few days sinking four-figures into the project at its absolute top. In my defense, the cheapest cards were flipping for like $60, let alone the rarest of the rare, the Lebron James and Steph Curry and Ja Morant legendary cards (minted in editions of 49-100), which were regularly changing hands for $50,000 or more.
For those of you unaware, NBATopshot is an NFT project built by DapperLabs (the same company which created for CryptoKitties) that launched in the Fall of 2020. It sold digital basketball cards, essentially, with various rarities (Common, Rare, Legendary) and edition sizes. After a tepid start, Topshot exploded in popularity at the beginning of 2021. It erupted out of the larger crypto-sphere and into mainstream consciousness, featuring in headlines written The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, CNBC, Bleacher Report, all storied news outlets with generalized, multinational audiences. “Topshot that!” became a common phrase on NBA broadcasts. I certainly don’t know what it was like within the crypto art and NFT ecosystems as NBATopshot speculation snowballed, but from the outside, it was like one of those hypnotic spirals that draws you closer…and closer…and closer. It wasn’t anywhere, and then, suddenly, it was everywhere.
The hook pierced cleanly and it pierced deep. I’ve yet to get it out. I don’t even want to.
I’ll regale you with one more story, which really lets you know what I’m like when I’m in trading mode. The “big thing” in Topshot during March of 2021 was the release of the “Cool Cats” collection. These special cards all had the following icons:
Which, besides demonstrating the absolute height of graphic design, skyrocketed a card’s value into the high-hundreds or low-thousands. My buddy and I had our eye on a “Challenge Reward,” where, by holding five separate Cool Cats cards, you were airdropped an even rarer card, in this case, of Los Angeles Lakers big-man, Anthony Davis. Did we pool our money together to qualify for that card? You bet we did. Was that airdrop the first time an NFT experience made my financial heart sing? Yup. Did it justify the immense amount of cash we put into the thing? Actually, at first, yes. The Anthony Davis Cool Cats reward card —which by itself was an edition of 6963 (I really had no context for any of this stuff; I would have lost my freakin’ mind at the concept of a 1/1)— boasted a $2000 valuation. This Anthony Davis Cool Cats card:
Just so you know I’m not completely full of shit, here are the three top sales for this same card, which, today, is worth between 4 and 8 dollars:
I chased the price as it plummeted. Classic Max. The floor was $2000? I listed for $2050. $1800? I was at $1875, waiting for a bounce. The bounce never came. That card, and the other Cool Cats cards, and, while we’re at it, almost every single Topshot card I’ve ever bought, is nowworthless.
But honestly, it doesn’t matter. It never mattered. I’ve been regularly collecting Topshot cards for three years. Literally moments ago, I bought more.I love the product. I don’t even need to love the product because I already love basketball more than almost anything, so how can I not love the product? And even more than that, I see the value! If you’re bought into NFTs as a concept, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t understand the value of NFT trading cards. Even that, however, is besides the point. Because the point is I continue to love this thing, and I’m not alone!
Topshot cards still get dropped, every two weeks or so, in packs that you either have to sign-up for beforehand or attain through sheer numerical luck in a random queue generator, and it’s not uncommon even today for 20,000 people to line-up for packs. In Topshot’s heyday, that number easily shot into the 100 and 200,000’s, but still, what other NFT project going today boasts 20,000 consistently-interested parties? There is something about Topshot which tightly grasps the attention of so many people, myself included. Can we make way more money elsewhere? Absolutely. Is every bet on Topshot a sucker’s bet? Undoubtedly. And yet, here we are: Stubborn, frustrated, besotted with blockchain-minted videos of tall men dunking basketballs.
Sure, I’m more of a degenerate gambler than I let on, and I certainly love sports more than I let on, but there are legitimately-inventive qualities within Topshot that I think its important we note. Here I want to invoke the ZeroOne platform on Avalanche, which is built on a few core principles that Colborn —my podcast co-host, M○C△ founder, and ZeroOne’s creator— espouses regularly:
Cultural value in the world of NFTs will eventually be marked by abundance, not scarcity. Like with music and literature, the more people who can own an artwork, a cultural symbol, a meme, whatever, if more people are personally involved, the cultural significance of both art and artist will increase commensurately.
You should not have to do somersaults to own NFTs. The necessity of owning and operating an independent crypto wallet is —like it or not— an obstacle in the way of larger cultural adoption. Future adoption requires email-only sign-ups, noncustodial wallets, and friendly interfaces.
Collecting is an ingrained human tendency which does not require the impetus of potential financial gains. People collect stamps, seashells, basketball cards, stickers, old gum, dollar-store sunglasses, all sorts of things for no other reason than they like to. That simple fact is reason enough.
ZeroOne applies these principles to visual art, but visual art has always been a niche product. Way more people —sorry— like sports than like almost anything, visual art included. Affixing these aforementioned principles to a product like the National Basketball Association, which counts among its players some of the most famous cultural entities in the world, and millions of regular viewers, and a massive social media presence, well that’s already pretty simple calculus. But Topshot preceded ZeroOne in basically all of the above innovations. You sign-up with an email address, you deposit and withdraw funds directly from your credit card. There are currently just under 59,000,000 Topshot NFTs in circulation, so if it’s abundance you’re after, look no further. The collection process is also so, so easy. You can buy from the marketplace, you can gamble on the content of pack drops, and there are a host other gamified mechanics at play: challenges, leaderboards, fantasy sports. You want to laugh Topshot off as a relic of the past and perhaps the most famous example of NFT culture going parabolic? I am not going to tell you you’re wrong. But in this silly, officially-licensed product are a number of the mass-adoption we are coming to see as crucial if NFT culture is ever going to expand beyond the confines of NFT Twitter.
But let’s leave the market aside and get personal for a second. NBATopshot mines value from nostalgia, which as Dwight Schrute once said, “is truly one of the greatest human weaknesses, second only to the neck.” Nostalgia is at work in the RarePepes community, it’s at work in so many of the PFP projects people continue to go apeshit for, and it’s at work here.
I remember where I was —in my room, screaming my head off— when Dallas Mavericks small forward, Luka Doncic, hit a buzzer beater 3-point shot to beat the Los Angeles Clippers in the Covid-era playoff game between the two teams. I’ve watched this clip so many times since then that I can conjure every warble in announcer Mike Breen’s voice as he says, “Doncic pulls-up —3-pointer…BANG! BANG! It’s good! Doncic wins the game at the buzzer!”
And I can own that moment if I want to! Actually, in looking it up just now, I realized it’s price has dropped dramatically, so as soon as I send this out, I will own it. Why? Because I want to.
This is pure, stupid, unconditional fun. NBATopshot will not rug. There are no wallet drainers. You rarely run into depressive Topshot commentary. I’m not anyone’s exit liquidity, at least not anymore. I just get to watch Luka Doncic hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer —BANG! BANG!— and pair that with the thrill of ownership. I can’t explain it. Blame my silly human genes.
On top of that, you never really love anybody like you love your first love. There’s something in the newness of that experience, diving so deeply and freely into it, disregarding anything except the current of this unstoppable new emotion. I know that incredible crypto art collectors like ArtieHandz got their start in Topshot, and it was where I got mine. When I found Solana PFP projects in August of 2021, I had already been indoctrinated to NFTs. I already bought-in to the calculus. That was doubly true when I entered crypto art in October of that same year. It was in NBATopshot where I saw how rabid attention can glom onto literally anything, where I myself became wrapped in the same frenzied fabric as 200,000 other idiots for the first time, where I fully realized the cultural staying power of all our digital tomfoolery. Many others had the same experience.
My ultimate point is this: I love this thing even though it’s become a punchline, maybe even because it’s become a punchline. But it really shouldn’t be. I think Topshot should be squarely in our sights as an example of how to position and reposition a product. There is, locked away in here, a case study on incentivizing and maintaining an audience. Also on how to be, you know, legitimately fun even when there are very few financial incentives included.
There are cathedrals everywhere, if only we open our eyes to see them. Now, if we’re all done here, I’ve got a basketball game to go watch. Win, lose, or draw, somewhere down the line, it will probably cost me money.
-Your friendly neighborhood Art Writer,
Max