No one would have thought that in less than half a year after entering the public beta, the sales of NBA Top Shot in the secondary market have reached 460 million US dollars, and as many as 3 million transactions have been processed. With this momentum, NBA Top Shot Dapper Labs, the famous Canadian development team behind it, also successfully completed a new round of financing of US$305 million recently.
After the completion of this round of financing, the valuation of this three-year-old start-up company has reached 2.6 billion US dollars. It is worth noting that in addition to some well-known investment institutions, it also attracted a group of NBA stars to participate in this financing. Including the well-known star Michael Jordan, as well as current players Kevin Durant, Kyle Lowry, Spencer Dinwiddie, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, etc., through these The participation of players shows the popularity of the game.
Among them, a dunk video collection of active star LeBron James was sold at a high price of 208,000 US dollars in February this year. Because of this, NBA Top Shot now has more than 800,000 registered accounts and has become a veritable "No. One-chain game" (Blockchain game).
Behind the NBA Top Shot fire has also given birth to the continued enthusiasm of the NFT market. According to the latest data, the value of the NFT trading market has almost quadrupled in 2020, exceeding 250 million US dollars. It is expected to still achieve greater growth this year. After all, an NFT work by the well-known digital artist Beeple has already fetched a sky-high price of nearly 70 million U.S. dollars, and market expansion seems to be within reach.
But in the face of the continued popularity of the NFT market, we can't help but start to worry whether this is a bubble, or the beginning of a new market, or whether platforms like NBA Top Shot can continue to maintain good market attention. topics that readers should focus on.
1. Three reasons why NBA Top Shot is so popular
The popularity of NBA Top Shot is not an accidental event. Its appearance has made up for the pain points of the century-old physical star card, the difficulty of distinguishing the authenticity of the physical star card, the stagnation of transactions, and the difficulty of introducing new content. , we will briefly describe the reasons for the popularity of NBA Top Shot below.
1. Official platform
NBA Top Shot is a blockchain-based NBA digital card collection game developed by Dapper Labs, and has gradually evolved into a digital collection platform.
It has been officially authorized by the NBA and designed in cooperation with the NBA and the NBA Players Association. At the beginning of its release, the card packs were divided into Common (common), Rare (rare) and Legendary (legendary). It is determined by the rarity and number, which also exacerbates the scarcity of certain cards in the hearts of fans.
In addition to text and pictures, NBA Top Shot also has three-dimensional dynamic presentation methods such as GIF or short video, which greatly enriches the content of the star card.
At the same time, a generation of legendary NBA stars such as Mike Jordan, Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala, and Klay Thompson participated in the investment of NBA Top Shot and carried out extensive publicity for it. The strong appeal among the fans has brought the premise for the popularity of NBA Top Shot.
2. Digitization of traditional gameplay
In fact, the upsurge of collecting star cards did not happen overnight. There is a tradition of collecting physical star cards in North America. In September 2020, the star card of NBA Bucks Giannis Antetokounmpo was sold. The sky-high price of 1.812 million US dollars.
As early as 1880, Goodwin & Co. Tobacco manufacturer launched the football card attached to the cigarette box as a gift for buying cigarettes, and the football card gradually formed a unique collection in the United States. In 2019, the Italian company PANINI signed exclusive distribution rights with the NBA, becoming the only company that can produce and distribute NBA physical star cards.
As a huge global sport, the NBA has more than 1 billion fans all over the world. From the first trapeze man Michael Jordan, to the black Mamba Kobe, to the little emperor James, whether you like basketball or not No one is unfamiliar with the huge IP of the NBA.
As of 2018, according to incomplete statistics, the eBay star card market in the United States alone has reached 4.7 billion US dollars. However, there are many limitations of the physical star card. Its authenticity is difficult to distinguish and difficult to save. It even gave birth to a company like BECKETT.
Founded in 1984, Beckett Media is a leading publisher of collectible platforms for the US sports and professional markets. Beckett Media operates Beckett.com, the leading online destination for sports collectibles enthusiasts and the premier publisher of monthly sports collectibles magazines.
The emergence of NBA Top Shot has filled this gap. With the help of blockchain's immutable and traceable features, it has created a unique NFT digital star card that is both scarce and deterministic. The NBA Top Shot took off on the strength of the physical star card, and finally attracted a lot of attention at the beginning of its release.
3. Consumer psychology
The essence of market demand comes from consumer psychology. The reason why NBA Top Shot is so popular is that its design combines the characteristics of collection and blind box, which guides participants to further participate and invest. The details are mainly because these mechanisms will bring rich inner experience to the participants, which makes people want to stop.
(1) Collector and Lucky
For some people, since they have participated in a certain type of collection project, they would like to collect all types of products of this project. All IP products are collected. For example, if you collect all the cards of a certain star in NBA Top Shot, in addition to the collectors who will take the initiative to collect them, there are also lucky ones who accidentally obtained rare products.
(2) Self-satisfaction
When certain special circumstances occur in the process of obtaining these products, it will bring greater satisfaction, such as the joy of collecting all the cards, or the excitement of opening rare cards. Then, the participants will spread the information to their friends or more people to satisfy their vanity.
(3) Social currency
Social currency is the consumption of two or more individuals in society before gaining a sense of identity and connection to their own knowledge reserves. It is something that reflects the value of an individual in a circle, or a simple understanding is a talking point. It can be Maotai, a rare game item, or an article shared in Moments. It can be a physical object or a virtual item or interest. Through sharing, others can appreciate the value of your social currency. to evaluate.
When a person has more social currency in a certain field, he will accumulate some prestige in this circle, that is, gain fans and become an influential KOL. From this, participation may gain fame.
(4) material harvest
In addition to gaining fame, participants can also get material rewards. When some popular and scarce products are obtained, they can be sold at a very high premium, or when certain products are collected, they can be packaged and sold to collectors. And some business-minded enthusiasts will use their professionalism in this area to become a second-hand trader, earn a considerable amount of sideline income, and even develop it into their own main business.
(5) Psychology of Addiction
The mechanism of the blind box is different from the mechanism of some "fixed income" types, and it has the fascinating characteristic of randomness. The "fixed income" mechanism is a relatively straightforward "you can become stronger by charging money", and the strong will always be strong, which is a game for the rich. The blind box mechanism with random attributes will allow ordinary people to become lucky, which not only increases the willingness of ordinary people to give it a try, but also further makes scarce resources more valuable.
Therefore, in addition to the above mental and material psychology that can bring positive feedback to people, coupled with the blind box mechanism, it will be very easy for participants to continue playing as if they are addicted. What's more, in order to satisfy some inner needs that are not easy to achieve, such as just to get a certain extremely scarce item, they will even invest wildly regardless of the consequences, which is no different from the psychology of a gambler.
And marketing is actually to understand human nature, and then guide it to its business model, and the mechanism of NBA Top Shot is obviously well versed in this, and it has also created the current hot scene.
2. The new trend of NFT
1. NFT's wealth-creating formula?
By dismantling the hot reasons for NBA Top Shot, we can roughly find some key factors from the reasons behind it.
The first is the characteristics of the NBA itself. The NBA has a huge fan base, and the age span of fans can be very large, which belongs to a project with strong consensus. These characteristics determine the audience and spending power of NBA Top Shot. Although NBA fans may not necessarily participate in NBA Top Shot, but with a large fan base, naturally the number of people participating in NBA Top Shot will not be too small. This mainly determines the market How big can be.
The second is the official platform. The official platform not only confirms the rights of the project itself (endows authority), but also diverts NBA Top Shot with its own huge traffic, directly bypassing the early cold start stage of a project. This is also what NBA Top Shot can do. One of the reasons why it has gained hundreds of thousands of users and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue within a few months of public beta testing.
The second is the blind box and collection mechanism design, which will allow participants to obtain both spiritual and material positive feedback, which will motivate participants to continue to participate in it, and will also indirectly guide people around them to participate. This is a "social game", not a "stand-alone game". The attribute of social currency makes NBA Top Shot so dynamic, which is why online games are more profitable than stand-alone games.
The last is the mature gameplay, as a test of this type of business model. The history of physical star cards has been around for a hundred years, which fully proves that the basis of NBA Top Shot's gameplay is based on practice. Therefore, although the popularity of NBA Top Shot exploded in just a few months, it seems to be a coincidence, but it is only natural after such a dismantling.
In this case, we can also abstract a set of formulas that NFT can run successfully based on this idea:
NFT successful project = strong consensus project + official platform + blind box and collection + mature gameplay
2. Inspiration from NBA Top Shot
After the previous analysis, we seem to be able to see that the popularity of NFT this time is not accidental, but we might as well calm down and think about the support behind it.
On the one hand, the sudden explosion of NBA Top Shot also verified another logic, that is, the digitization of the blockchain can bring huge market support to old projects.
Due to the real problems of forgery, verification, difficulty in transactions, and easy loss of physical cards, there are huge transaction obstacles and friction costs. With the blessing of blockchain technology, the problem of authenticity can be solved, and cards can be directly stored on the chain. For verification, no verification agency is required, and it cannot be forged, and it is easy to save.
What's more important is the huge increase in transactions brought about by the blockchain. In the past, transactions may only be a small group of offline group transactions, or through a center with authentication qualifications, the transaction group is small and the transaction is difficult. After all this is put on the chain, it is possible to easily build a trading platform for global participants without the need for cumbersome verification links, increasing the transaction speed by several times or even dozens of times. This means that the volume of the original market will also be increased several times or even more.
On the other hand, as we just said, NFT has a successful formula, which is actually not difficult to achieve, as can be seen from the physical cards of many other types of sports besides basketball on Beckett Media. And with the improvement of people's material living standards, in recent years, people are more inclined to obtain some social currency that meets spiritual needs. Posting on Moments, showing it on Twitter, and getting more likes and replies has become a growing inner appeal of people. This can be seen from the skyrocketing revenue of global mobile games and the sudden emergence of blind boxes such as Bubble Mart, which shows that there will be more and more new potential items similar to physical sports cards.
(Tom Brady's autographed football card set a record $2.25 million)
That being the case, it seems that it is not difficult to find a business model that matches the formula and reproduce the NBA Top Shot effect, and it may even lead to a new wave of NFTization of mature models.
3. Current projects with similar attributes
Revisiting the NFT wealth creation formula, and then looking at the current blockchain projects, we can already find some clues that projects with these attributes are currently in the pipeline.
Football is the most widely recognized ball game in the world, how can it be missed? A project called Sorare has launched NFT player cards based on a fantasy football game developed by itself, and has already won the cooperation of famous stars such as Ronaldo and Mbappe, as well as star clubs such as Barcelona and AC Milan.
And the biggest contributor to this NBA Top Shot, the development team behind it, Dapper Labs, has also planned to recreate the glory, and has cooperated with projects that also have a strong consensus, such as the professional women's basketball league WNBA hosted by the NBA in the United States, and the current world. UFC is the top and largest professional mixed martial arts event.
It can be said that with the popularity of NBA Top Shot, a wave of proven "success models" may be hitting...
3. Future Outlook
Therefore, what we can see is that the real impact of NBA Top Shot on the industry is that people will be shocked. It turns out that NFT can still play like this, and it turns out that the blockchain can really create a C-end with hundreds of thousands of users. Product, and this is the most shocking aspect it brings us.
After all, many people will lament why the number of application users in the blockchain industry has been tens of thousands at most in the past few years, and most of them may only be a few thousand. This is the status quo faced by DApps, but the changes brought about by NBA Top Shot are indeed It has attracted more outsiders to participate in blockchain applications. Of course, they may not fully understand what blockchain is, but as a foodie, why do they need to learn how to cook?
Some people may still think that the popularity of NFT is driven by bubbles, but the facts tell us that without the surge of bubbles, where can we drink sweet and delicious beer? Therefore, when we participate in the bubble, we only need to recognize the changes it may bring, and then find something that can last for a long time and apply what we have learned. This is the best policy.
As for the expansion needs of the NFT market in the future, we have already explained in previous articles. We still believe that this will be the next trillion-scale market, and more innovators and entrepreneurs will inevitably enter , we will wait and see!
