NBA Top Shot to Sell NFTs In-Person at Summer League Games

It might be the NBA offseason, but Dapper Labs has big plans for its NBA Top Shot crypto collectibles platform for the rest of the summer. Today, Dapper revealed that the service will offer exclusive NFT moments that can only be purchased at NBA Summer League games in Las Vegas.

This marks the first time that the service—which sells NBA video highlights packaged as rare, trading card-like digital moments—has created NFT collectibles that can only be purchased from a physical location. It’s also the first time that NBA Top Shot moments will be available for purchase at real NBA games, even if these are off-season games that will primarily feature newly-drafted rookies and minor league G League players.

Essentially, fans can pre-purchase a moment that will later be created based on footage from one of the games held each day. One moment each will be created from a game on August 8, 9, and 10, respectively, with the specific games to be announced closer to the dates.

Each moment can be purchased for $5 from a kiosk at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas, and the number of moments minted will be based on total demand, with a minimum edition size of 1,000 for each NFT. The NFTs will be delivered to fans’ Top Shot accounts “as quickly as possible,” per a blog post, possibly as soon as the day after the game. Fans may purchase up to 10 of these moments apiece each day.

Dapper Labs will also fly out eight NBA Top Shot users to attend next week’s games via a sweepstakes, with the number of drawing entries determined by the NFT moments they already own as well as collectible challenges completed. The firm previously sent eight Top Shot collectors to the NBA Finals in a similar sweepstakes, as well as the recent NBA Draft.

Top Shot’s roadmap

NBA Top Shot was arguably the biggest winner of this spring’s NFT market explosion, helping to introduce crypto collectibles into the mainstream as pro athletes backed the platform and moments sold for thousands of dollars or more on the secondary marketplace. A LeBron James moment sold for $387,600 in April, marking the peak so far for the platform. Top Shot has reportedly generated more than $700 million in transaction volume to date.

In an interview streamed today as part of Top Shot’s online “First Mint Fest,” Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou recalled the sudden crush of demand in February and March, and how it made Top Shot difficult to use for a while.

Gharegozlou admitted that Dapper was ill-prepared for the enormous surge of users, echoing comments from Dapper’s Caty Tedman last spring, but said that his company has boosted its customer service team and is “ready for the next leg of growth.” He said that would include moments from the next NBA season, “legendary players” from the NBA’s past, and Dapper’s third-party partnerships, including upcoming avatar marketplace Genies.

Beyond new Top Shot sets and partnerships, Gharegozlou also suggested that Dapper will provide “more communication and more transparency” to NFT collectors, and that his team is working on “mass-scale” engagement efforts beyond the Summer League arena promotion.

Lastly, he spoke of NBA Top Shot Hardcourt, a mobile game tie-in that was planned to help introduce NFT collectibles to the mainstream NBA fan—before the NFT moments themselves found a huge audience on their own. He said that the game is in testing, but admitted that Dapper is “not happy with where it slots into” the overall Top Shot experience now.

“We’re confident that moment ownership directly can be a mass market activity,” Gharegozlou said, adding that Dapper will launch the Hardcourt game “when we’re ready for the millions of users that are going to come.”