Climbing the Leaderboard 🪜
Climbing the Leaderboard 🪜
Featuring Moment Locking, Team & Player Leaderboards, IRL Experiences in Las Vegas & More
GM, B&B Crew! Cheers to the weekend!
Hope you all had an excellent week, and scored something nice in the TS queues on Thursday and Friday!
Top Shot is finding its groove, ETH is climbing, CryptoPunks are flying — and things are feeling not so terrible in the NFT world despite the harsh macro conditions!
Lots to cover, so let’s get right into all the action from the last few days:
Climbing the Leaderboard 🪜
Top Shot shipped another long-anticipated feature on Friday — Team Leaderboards and moment ‘locking’ (basically staking).
Similar to the ‘nesting rewards’ seen in popular ETH project Moonbirds, collectors who lock their moments will see rewards throughout the year (current minimum locking time is 365 days). Via the blog:
“Collectors can expect exclusive airdrops and groundbreaking rewards to those who rank highly on the Leaderboards, distributed periodically throughout each year”
The first reward will be a new type of moment, distributed to the Top 750 collectors on each team leaderboard by October, called ‘Dynamic Duos’.
A lot of good NBA dynamic duos come to mind, but one hit me right away:
Additionally, it looks like Top Shot will be taking a page out of the NFL All Day playbook, with ‘Moment Reels’ coming as leaderboard rewards. Similar to the ‘Melts’ in All Day, Reels will contain more than one play/highlight within the moment.
As you might guess, it’s going to be pretty difficult to get to the top of the leaderboards, given some of the collections held by early adopters (like Carlini below):
We’ve always said that Top Shot has a multitude of levers at their disposal to right the course, and over the past few months we’ve seen significant progress on a variety of fronts. Kudos to the team for some exciting new ways to interact with the platform, and bringing some bullishness back to the community:
IRL Incentives 😎
Summer League is in full swing, and despite some initial anger at the lack of clarity around Top Shot events a few weeks/months ago, those who made the trip out to Las Vegas look to be having some… Pretty cool experiences!
In addition to some pickup games/open gym, collectors also got to hang with some former NBA vets — and also got exclusive access to packs containing three new historical moments from players in attendance: JR Smith (Top Shot Debut), Channing Frye (Top Shot Debut) and Richard Jefferson:
‘The Tour’ packs will be exclusively available to purchase for those in attendance, at $99 a pack. Seems a bit steep… But cool concept!
More details on Top Shot’s presence in Las Vegas here.
When life gives you a chance to use a JR Smith GIF, you take it:
Jokes aside, providing experiences like this — the opportunity to mingle with players and be a part of the action — is something that Top Shot knocks out of the park:
TFM x Flowty 🤝
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 🗣
🎧 Can Brands Win in NFTs? (Feat. Adam Brotman)
These brands, they are a changin’. With many fortune 100 brands now entered into the web3 arena, what will this seismic shift mean for the average retail consumer, who will now need to navigate the metaverse to find their fave product? We welcome Adam Brotman, former EVP + CDO of Starbucks, and now advisor to many web3 projects, to talk the brands of web3.
🎧 The Future of UFC Strike (Feat. Malik Jiffry)
🎧 The Future of Intellectual Property (Feat. Tally Labs)
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.