A Paris Affair 🇫🇷🏀
Featuring Adam Silver, an email from the NBA, a true play to earn game, and only 7 games of football left.
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Bonjour! 🥐🧀🏀
Man, French people are so lucky.
Their country has some of the tastiest stereotypes! Cheese, Bread, Wine, Cuisine, etc.
What do we have in Canada? Poutine? That’s basically just a french derivative.
This week, the NBA descended on Paris for their 2023 Paris Game showcase between Chicago and Detroit.
And in the NFT world, Sorare may have stolen the show with their panel interview between Founder Nicolas Julia, NBA Comissionner Adam Silver, and NBAPA Executive Director Tameka Tremaglio.
Highlights from the panel:
Nicolas led off by making a joke about France’s impending labour strike.
Adam Silver talks about how Soccer is far bigger than Basketball, but the NBA wants to close that gap.
Tamika Tremaglio discusses the players as entrepreneurs, and letting them blossom as individuals in tech and any other areas they choose.
They make a bunch of jokes about Paris Fashion Week, particularly aimed at Silver and his basic suit.
The panel was hosted at Sorare HQ, and was followed shortly by an email sent out to the NBA.com mailing list pumping sign ups for Sorare.
It makes sense for Sorare to get prime billing.
The company is one of the darlings of the french tech scene, having raised over $700M in funding these last five years. The platform boats over 2 million accounts (although the monthly active users is closer to 40k).
And a reminder next week’s podcast is with Nicolas Julia, where we discuss his come up as a tech entrepreneur, his card collecting roots, and just a wee bit of alpha regarding the platform.
Subcribe here to get it first thing Monday!
With the festivities over, the attention in the NBA now shifts to the All Star Game on February 19th in Salt Lake City. And we want to know, WHAT ELSE could the league be doing to enhance its fandom.
Now onto everything that happened this week.
🌍 Top Shot Goes Global
It seems like just yesterday that NBA Top Shot was banned in only TWO countries: China and France (why?)
And yet, the platform has now descended on Paris this past week for the NBA Showcase, and even brought Joakim Noah to hang with collectors.
Elsewhere, the platform has started sending collectors to various physical card shows to represent TS and spread the good word.
Although these trade show appearances are relatively small moves in terms of moving the needle, I think its actually quite fun and done with good purpose.
When Top Shot blew up 2 years ago, I was inundated with messages from card collectors, telling me how they were going to sell their collections for NFTs. I was given a front row seat to the card collecting world and its reaction to the digital era. Would it succeed? Would the old guard resist?
The jury is still out, as some brave souls made the jump, and others stayed behind to clutch their PSA 10s.
Top Shot showing up on their territory is something that should have happened over 18 months ago, but better late than never. TS needs to rebuild its core fanbase, and getting right in there with true collectors is a good starting point.
🏈 ALL DAY Continues Playoff Push
There are only seven games of NFL action left this year. And NFL ALL DAY is going all out before it all wraps up!
This weekend, they have:
5x crafting challenges (cheapest one: $30 for Brock Purdy)
3x divisional round playbooks (three difficulties)
1x bracket pick playbook (its FREE)
They also still have almost half of their 50k Hot Route packs available on the site, which I still can’t decide if its a good or bad thing that they haven’t sold out.
Despite a tank in the market last October, ALL DAY has done a good job at persevering through the season and doing their best to listen to the fan base. I still see a lot of speculative chatter in the streets, which is a good sign of engaged users.
Are you an AD collector? Would love to hear your thoughts on their first full season:
📦 Dookey Dash Goes LIVE
Not sports related, but definitely gaming.
Bored Apes finally launched Dookey Dash, their first actual playable game experience for all holders of the Sewer Pass, and it has NFT Twitter aflutter with activity!
The collection has already amassed over $30M in volume in just 36 hours, and looks well on its way to being yet another successful value return to Ape holders.
If you’re out of the loop, here’s the TLDR:
There are 30,000 Passes, spread across 4x rarity tiers
Passes were claimable for holders of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes
Passes were FREE to claim. Floor price Tier 1 is ~$2,800
Holders have until February 8th to play "Dookie Dash”
On February 8th, the scores “lock” and top leaderboards get prizes
On February 15th, all Passes that were used in game qualify for the next phase
Some people (like me) didn’t even bother to play the game thought - they just straight up took profits. In some cases, they put it into something else!
The game is an incredibly significant step forward for the space imo.
For years, we’ve been touting “Play To Earn” as the next big thing, but very few applications in crypto have been able to deliver that vision (outside of a few ponzinomic style games).
Now we have an actual fun and playable game, playable with NFT assets (although pricey), created by the biggest brand in the space. Hopefully its something that catches the attention of the much-maligned anti-crypto gamer crowd!
Here is what’s on tap:
🔴 NFL ALL DAY Playoff Bracket | 30 seconds
The Divisional Round bracket is LIVE on NFL ALL DAY and its completely FREE. Pick your teams for this weekend and have at it!
🔴 Own The Moment Streak | 30 seconds
OTM has launched “streak” where you pick a daily outcome of an NBA game. It literally JUST launched, with rewards coming to those who do all the “tasks”,
🟢 Answers to Tour De France NFTs | 2 minutes
We shared the first 5 answers in last week’s newsletter, and here are the ones for this week. These are the STAGE numbers. 7 - Marcel Kittel | 8 - Luis Ocana | 9 - Julio Jimenez | 10 - Aligot | 11 - Augustonemetum | 12 - Tom Pidcock
🟢 Top Shot Hot Packs for 10 bucks | 2 minutes
TS has $10 packs on right now, with a 3% chance at a rare. I typically can’t resist cracking one or two of these. That’s a referral link there is you’re new.
🔵 Calculate your NFT Earnings on NFT Bank | 30 minutes
Tax season is coming so get your full CSV transaction download on NFT Bank (its free!). I used this last year to do my taxes (it was still challenging). We are not affiliated.
Feel like its been a while since we had a sweet Ja Morant highlight, so here’s an absolutely INSANE dunk.
Fun clip here where Jabari Smith Jr. lets LeBron know that the King’s first ever NBA Game was played against Jabari Smith’s father!
Top rated prospect Victor Wembanyama was seen attending the Paris game (he’s french), showing off some serious drip
Not basketball, but Tennis.
Andy Murray pulled off an absolutely insane comeback at the Australian open, coming back from 2 sets down to win. The match latest six hours and wrapped up at like 4:00 AM local time.
And last, another banger from the #1 ranked snitch ref, who has spent the last few months exposing how the NBA basically ignores casual travelling from its top stars.
His target this week: Kevin Durant.
Notable highlights from the last seven days:
Web3
Australia is launching its own Stablecoin | Decrypt
The CEO of Alogrand trolled fans with a “Nike” tweet | Reddit
Crypto owners jumped 39% in 2022 | Watcher
I wrote a piece on Preparing for the Next Bull Run | The First Mint
The Weekly Charts
In the sports charts, Sorare continued its dominance (although this figures combines ALL licenses and primary sales), while ALL DAY saw a bump above $1M following its Ultimate pack drop late last week.
Looks like we may not have seen the worst of the bear market just yet, as previous bear market have seen much larger (and often longer) dips than this one.
And the total crypto trademark applications in 2022 looks to have skyrocketed, although many of those came in the early part of the year.
Some great memes this week following the DOJ’s banning of a Russian Crypto Exchange, during an announcement that many thought would bring bigger and much worse news for the blockchain industry.
Not a meme, but kind of
**This is not financial advice. Nothing in this newsletter, podcast, or publication should be considered financial or trading advice of any kind. Please do your own thorough research and make your own trading decisions. This is not advice.”
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