New Orleans Pelicans: How you can make money on NBA Top Shot
By Tim Burke
The new sensation is sweeping across fanbases around the NBA. What is it, how does it work, and what kind of value can you get with New Orleans Pelicans players?
New Orleans Pelicans: What is NBA Top Shot?
If you’re reading this piece I’m guessing you’ve already at least heard of NBA Top Shot, if not already started your collection. If you haven’t heard of then allow me to be the first one to welcome you to either the next version of trading cards or a trendy bubble. Full disclosure, I’ve already started my own collection and want this community to continue to grow. Here’s the link to Top Shot’s FAQ so you can do more research for yourself, but I’ll answer some key questions below.
light. Related Story. The Pels should trade for Dinwiddie and Claxton
So you said this could be the next version of trading cards, what does that mean? Well on Top Shot you can buy moments (video highlights) of your favorite players.
How is that different than watching clips on YouTube? It’s not much different from that, however, the moments you get on Top Shot are higher quality than most clips you’ll find online. Another point and one that’s been said over and over by anyone writing about this, how is a trading card different than basketball-reference? Cards and basketball-reference will both show you a picture of a player and all their stats.
Trading cards have numbers making them unique items, videos can’t do that. You’re right the highlights on YouTube don’t have individual numbers to make them unique. But on Top Shot each moment is numbered and the total number of moments per highlight is limited.
How do they make the moments unique? That’s done by turning these moments into Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT’s). What that means is be giving each moment a serial number they’ve created something that can only be owned by one person at a time. Basically, these moments are like individual shares of a stock, when the price goes up your moment is worth more.
How do I get a moment? You can buy individual moments from the marketplace or buy a pack. The base packs come with three moments and sell for $9. The packs are released during “drops” where a limited number of packs become available and you wait in line to get one. The rarer the moments in the packs, the more limited the release is (the latest Rising Stars drop was limited to 32,000 packs).
How hard is it to get a pack during one of these drops? Well, that depends on the number of that queue up for each drop. The Rising Stars drop saw more than 200,000 people try to get a pack. The drop just before this last one saw the Top Shot team release one drop at three separate times. This Seeing Stars drop also saw over 60,000 packs available in each window so only about 30,000 people went home unhappy versus the nearly 160,000 people in the Rising Stars drop.
So what are the drawbacks? Well, right now the website is still in the beta version so there will still be some very real changes over the coming months. Along with that, there is a waiting process to get your account verified, which is necessary to withdraw any money you were to make. Any profits made from selling moments go into your Dapper Wallet and you can use that money to purchase new moments instead of using your credit card.
What about the New Orleans Pelicans?