NBA Top Shot Sees $32 Million of Trading Volume in a Day

By Tim Copeland

Blockchain-based NFT collectible NBA Top Shot is taking off big time.

In the last 24 hours, more than 27,000 people traded the basketball-themed cards, according to Cryptoslam. In total, they made 139,000 trades, while exchanging $32.4 million of cryptocurrency. This huge surge in trading volume and activity has pushed Top Shot to the top of the NFT market where it’s now leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

NBA star Spencer Dinwiddie. Image: Wikimedia Commons

NBA Top Shot is a digital version of collectible trading cards, in which each card takes the form of a non-fungible token (NFT)—a unique token that has digital scarcity. They are stored on the Flow blockchain, made by Dapper Labs—which is one of the key partners behind the venture, along with the NBA. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is a big supporter, having traded some Top Shot cards himself.

Top Shot cards start from around $29 for the most common cards (when there are a lot of them). Rarer cards can start from the low thousands up to peak values of $250,000.

Recent sales of NBA Top Shot. Image: Cryptoslam

Looking at the longer timeframe, NBA Top Shot’s lead over its NFT collectible rivals is widening. In the past month, 52,000 buyers spent $144 million on over a million Top Shot trades. In comparison, Cryptopunks, the next biggest set of collectibles, had just 648 buyers, with around $60 million in trading volume.

What are NFTs?

Crypto collectibles like NBA Top Shot work by creating non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on a blockchain. Unlike regular coins, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, they are all unique. Each token is associated with a specific piece of art or collectible, and the owner of that token owns the associated artwork.

Other NFT collectibles include CryptoKitties, the pioneering NFT game created by Dapper Labs; Hashmasks, a recent collection of 17,000 pieces of art; Sorare, which trades football cards. Combined, these projects had around 370 buyers with $1.6 million of trading volume.

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