Trader Drops $105k on NBA Crypto Collectibles for LeBron James’s Bday

By Tim Hakki

For LeBron James’s birthday, NFT trader Pranksy has ‘decided to double down’ on NBA Top Shot, the blockchain-based digital trading card game that has recently been making a lot of money for investors. 

Pranksy, not to be confused with the British Banksy copycat, is a 29-year-old mobile games designer from the UK. He moonlights as an NFT trader, and an extremely successful one at that. He made half a million dollars trading NFTs, he claimed on Zima Red’s two hour-long podcast.

Pranksy put his money to work by spending 140 ETH (then $105k; now $107k) on 6,272 “moments” on nba_topshot and more than 50+ “#1 serials”. “Volume has been picking up for weeks so I decided to double down!” he tweeted with jubilance. 

NBA Top Shot, Pranksy’s latest investment, is the creation of Vancouver based Dapper Labs and is officially licensed by the NBA. The NFTs are a form of digital scarcity capturing the best plays from NBA’s recent history, referred to by the community as 'Moments.' Each card comes with stats and a video highlight. 

Before opening to the public at the beginning of October, the game’s closed beta users had purchased 43,000 randomized packs of cards, bringing NBA Top Shot more than $2 million in revenue. 

Pranksy’s purchase wasn’t the first time sporting legend LeBron James made crypto news, either. LeBron’s Moments have been some of the most expensive cards traded so far. Four have gone for upwards of $2000 with the most expensive, the ’LeBron James Cosmic Dunk’ going for $5200 at the start of October and reaching $7300 before Christmas.

Much like a regular trading card game, NBA Top Shot Moments are launched in sets with limited runs. Its growing popularity has recently incentivized NBA Top Shot to enable collectors to hold unopened packs for trading.

NBA Top Shot tokens were the first product to launch on Dapper Labs’s Flow blockchain. Flow was conceived by the team responsible for the enormously popular CryptoKitties. To date, over $5 million dollars has been traded through NBA Top Shot since opening to the public. 

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