Going With the FLOW 🏪
Going With the FLOW 🏪
Featuring a Gaia Marketplace Announcement, Historical Set Speculation, NBA Watercooler Talk & more
GM, B&B Team! Hope you’ve had an excellent week, and cheers to the freakin’ weekend!
Lot’s to chat about today, so let’s get into all the action from the last few days:
Going With the FLOW 🏪
We got some big news for the FLOW ecosystem on Friday, with NFT Genius (founders of Ballerz and Gaia) announcing a major Series A raise ($150M valuation) led by Dapper Labs — and that NBA Top Shot moments will soon be able to be bought, sold and traded on the Gaia Marketplace.
More context, via this Twitter Spaces:
There is some alpha of interest in this conversation, including Gaia’s plans to be the major FLOW marketplace, the ability to bulk buy and list moments (get those brooms out) with $ FLOW, and even some out-there innovations like mixed-NFT packs.
This seems overall very bullish for Top Shot and obviously the broader FLOW ecosystem — we’ve all seen the impact that OpenSea volume and features have on the entire market — and incorporating into the Gaia Marketplace could speed up the pace of many highly requested features in the TS community.
Historical Hunches 👴🏻
With the 2022-23 NBA season rapidly approaching, it’s a good time to take stock of what Top Shot content remains for the next few months.
With the latest drop of Lottery Locker Packs selling out in just days (quite the feat for needing 800,000 Trade Tickets), the only remaining release we know of is a historical drop coming prior to October, featuring many new Top Shot Debuts.
Wondering who might be coming down the pipeline and making their first journey onto the marketplace? We got you covered with some speculation:
And this new moment type was recently added to the marketplace filters:
Which means we are likely seeing the Sky Hook (and one of the best players of all-time) coming to the platform:
Injury Woes, Uniting Foes 🎭
We had two major NBA storylines dominate the Twitter-verse this week — one sad, one hilarious.
The sad — the news coming out that No. 2 overall pick Chet Holmgren will miss the entire 2022-23 season after suffering a foot injury in Jamal Crawford’s Pro-Am last weekend.
While the tired take is going to be how his skinny frame couldn’t hold up (he was defending LeBron James on a fast break when the injury happened) — nothing about his play in preseason/on tape has shown that to be the case. Injuries happen, and it’s just unfortunate as hell — and the game was later cancelled due to unsafe court conditions, which is the issue I’d personally focus on here. That being said:
Now for the hilarious — the Lakers trading Talen Horton-Tucker & Stanley Johnson to the Jazz for… Patrick Beverley! This move unites two players (Beverley and Russell Westbrook) who absolutely hate each other. Get your popcorn out:
Flowty x TFM 🤝
The First Mint is excited to partner 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).
You might have seen a tweet like this floating around the Top Shot Twittersphere. Did you know that you can take out a personal loan using your Top Shot moment as collateral? Or that you can fund a peer's loan to generate passive income?
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 King of NFT Twitter (Feat. ThreadGuy)
What does it take to get 5000 Likes on a single tweet about NFTs? Today's guest, ThreadGuy, can tell you all about it. He started writing threads, but is now a primary player in the meme economy of the crypto world. His secrets to success include capturing timely sentiment, a competitive nature, and an absolutely chaotic approach to making daily content.
🎧 The ETH Merge Explained (Feat. 0xQuit)
🎧 What Makes an NFT Bull Run? (Feat. Mack Flavelle)
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.
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