A Wild Wade Cheat Code 📝
Featuring NBA Offseason Updates, Withering Wades, Pack Primer, WNBA Wins & More
Good Morning, B&B Friends! Cheers to the weekend — hope your week has been an excellent one!
Around the league — the offseason is still being held hostage by Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, with both Nets stars fighting to force their way out of Brooklyn. And while there’s been a lot of smoke around KD to Phoenix (DeAndre Ayton’s free agency still in limbo) and Kyrie to the Lakers (where there’s smoke, there’s fire… And there is a whole lotta smoke).
While most movement has been on pause, Blazers fans got some good news on Friday with a massive two-year extension for Damian Lillard (2 years, $122M 💰).
Also, apparently the Summer League is getting rings now?
I’m all for making a more competitive element to everything, but man — I can’t imagine that many players will be rocking a SL ring in public!
Let’s get into all the action from the last few days:
Withering Wades 🔥
Top Shot introduced the next two ‘Squad Goals’ crafting challenges on Friday (Houston and Miami), with a Cheat Code twist for the Heat:
Yes, the infamous Dwyane Wade Vintage Vibes moment — the highest minted highlight in Top Shot history — is feeling the burn! The ‘open edition’ of sorts launched in October, with nearly 240,000 minted at $9 a pop.
This turned out to be bad trading decision, with the floor price hovering around $2-3 for most of the year — and with over 30,000 already entering the Locker Room for trade tickets.
I’m not sure how many people have 50 Wades laying around (and I’m sorry if you bought that many), but if you do — your time has come! The Wade Cheat Code route will save you a cool $10, according to OTM’s challenge tracker.
If things have felt hot and heavy around the Top Shot streets lately, it’s because we’ve seen plenty of burning action:
Pack Primer 📦
The next big NBA pack is on the horizon, with the all-trade ticket Elite packs (feat. a guaranteed Legendary/MGLE) coming next Thursday.
The final drop of Series 3 will cost 60 trade tickets, with some extensive allow-list usage for some interesting groups:
I love the unique subsets of the community being rewarded instead of just set holders, especially those who have struck out in the past Legendary queues. Also exciting was this blurb:
If you are selected for the Allowlist:
A guaranteed pack is reserved for you to purchase. You don’t need to join a Priority or General Queue to try and land a spot in line.
You can purchase the pack any time in a 24-hour window using a dedicated Queue.
This is another step forward towards a balance between the queue and the reservation systems — and finding ways to avoid having users wait in lines is always a win in my book.
Enjoy your skip to the front of the line, allow-listers!
W(NBA) Wins ⛹️♀️
In other pack news, the big WNBA drop went down on Thursday, with the second base drop of the year featuring several new Top Shot Debuts. And at $9, the drop looks to have been EV+, per TST:
With the WNBA All Star Weekend currently happening, we’ve also got two Flash Challenges live around the events (3PT Contest & All-Star Game) — some fun requirements to get collectors following along with the action.
The First Mint is excited to announce our new partnership with Flowty, a peer-to-peer NFT loan and rental platform on the Flow Blockchain founded by Michael Levy (fondly known as MBL throughout the Top Shot community):
Are you an NBA Top Shot collector / investor? Did you know that you can do a LOT more with moments than just buy and sell them?
Need help completing a Top Shot challenge? Rent on Flowty.
Have extra moments for a challenge and want to generate income in a safe way? Rent out your moments on Flowty.
Need liquidity but don’t want to sell your moments? Use moments as collateral to take out a loan on Flowty.
Looking for an alternative way to invest in Top Shot? Generate passive income by lending (funding loans) on Flowty.
Flowty’s rental and loan marketplace allows renters, owners, borrowers and lenders to transact in a safe and easy way!
Want to learn more? Join the Flowty Discord and follow along on Twitter at @flowty_io.
Around The First Mint 🗣
🎧 The Future of UFC Strike (Feat. Malik Jiffry)
In the last month alone, UFC Strike has shipped Burning, Free Moments, Themed-Drops, Champions Club, and setup an incredible booth at International Fight Week. Although this is a bit more of a niche topic than usual for the show, I wanted to dive in because I’ve personally found the speed and execution of UFC Strike to be beyond that of its counterparts in the Dapper ecosystem.
🎧 The Future of Intellectual Property (Feat. Tally Labs)
🎧 The New Boss In Top Shot (Feat. Jayne Peressini)
🎧 The Next 100,000,000 in NFTs
Thanks for reading! — Zach @ The First Mint
Follow Zach on Twitter at @GhostOfGregOden.
**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.”
About The First Mint
The First Mint is a web3 media company. We make. We write. We talk. We listen.