New Orleans Pelicans: Zion Williamson and NBA Top Shot update
By Tim Burke
Zion Williamson just keeps finding ways to bring value to the New Orleans Pelicans, now through NBA Top Shot.
The fire beneath NBA Top Shot collectors is still growing as the signups keep rolling in. What’s the driving force behind this week’s surge?
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This week didn’t have the excitement of multiple rare pack drops and the early wave of NBA fans shouting from their soapboxes about how Top Shot could be the next big thing. However, there were still some encouraging signs for growth in the marketplace, I’ll get to those in a bit. While we didn’t have multiple drops for rare moments, there was a 2021 All-Star Game moment drop yesterday and two short notice common drops during the week.
NBA Top Shot: What changed this week
Possibly the biggest thing to happen on the site this week was the introduction of time limits between buying and listing moments for sale. This was key because after pack drops last weekend, people would sell rare moments way under what the price should have been. This was nice because if you were lucky you could scoop up some of these moments and hold onto them.
The problem with listing the moments so cheap, beyond the obvious de-valuing of the asset, was all the added traffic this cause on the marketplace as collectors and flippers rush to grab these moments. Top Shot would enter “maintenance mode” just minutes after the marketplace would open and you’d be forced to refresh your screen like Jesse Eisenberg at the end of The Social Network.
What this did is Top Shot has created time limits to buying moments and placing your own for sale. Initially, this limit was two hours but has since been reduced gradually to ten minutes. This seems to have been for a couple of reasons. As I said last week this site is still in the Beta stage, meaning there will be some hiccups along the way. Mainly that stems from the sheer volume of increased signups, no one could have predicted the boomtown Top Shot would turn into a month ago.
As we all rush towards our figurative 1849 California, remember they didn’t have anywhere near the capacity to house everyone who felt the calling of the frontier. Top Shot is no different, their servers have had issues keeping up with all the traffic but that has been getting exponentially better since the time limits were imposed. These time limits will continue to decrease as the site’s infrastructure gets built out more fully.