Lock Your Moments Up 🔒
Featuring Summer League Fun, GM Gossip, New Features Incoming, Challenge Corner & More
Good Morning, B&B Team — hope you all had a great weekend, and touched some grass during the summer holidays!
For those of you like myself who are currently in basketball withdrawal, it’s been nice to see some Summer League action over the last few days (yes, I am that sicko who actually watches). While the performances don’t always mean much, it’s always a fun mix of rookies looking to make their mark, journeymen trying to play their way onto a roster, and random names you haven’t thought about in years.
Some standout performances from the first few games include Chet Holmgren (2nd overall pick to the Thunder) Nikola Jovic (27th overall pick to the Heat), Keegan Murray (4th overall pick to the Kings). Basketball is back (kind of)!
This is still probably my favorite Summer League highlight of all time:
Let’s get into all the action from the last few days:
GM Gossip 📰
NBA Top Shot GM Jayne Peressini (who stopped by the TFM Pod a few weeks ago) hopped into the VIP chat on Tuesday, dropping some alpha about the upcoming series and marketing initiatives.
A few interesting quotes pulled from the Discord chat:
On upcoming marketing/ramping up new users:
“We’ll be spending somewhere between $35M-$60M on acquiring new users this series. That’s a significant increase from last series. That’s not including existing users through utility, offers, rakebacks, the like.”
On exiting beta:
“It’s been clarified to me that we can’t leave ‘beta’ until a few things are met. A big one is a transactional mobile app.”
On the biggest current task right now:
“S4 roadmap and Set Rewards.” (Jayne also mentioned that the S4 roadmap would hopefully be finalized this week)
Full thread with more details:
In what feels like a pretty slow time in Top Shot right now, it’s good to hear that there are some big things on the horizon. I also think these are things that the broader community would love to hear, and not just the VIP channel — maybe we need a transcript/notes system much like we used to see after Office Hours?
The $ amount for marketing spend also stood out to me — that’s quite the bag! New users getting ready to be exposed to the platform:
Lock It Up 🔒
We got an interesting look at some upcoming features on Tuesday, after @clegainz stumbled onto some pages inadvertently went live before quickly being removed:
The locking/staking feature is something that users have clamored for, and will be another interesting lever added to the economy.
We’ve seen staking/locking work particularly well in other NFT projects, with Moonbirds ‘nesting’ feature coming to mind as a recent success (albeit at much lower numbers than the amount of moments out in the ecosystem). I’m also excited to see what rewards might be available to incentivize users to lock up moments - the juice has to be worth the squeeze.
Also shown is a Team Leaderboards page, which will be another way to reward different subsets of users (as we’ve seen in the past).
Challenge Corner 🏆
More ‘Squad Goals’ team challenges continued to roll out this week, with the Sacramento Kings and Brooklyn Nets up in the rotation. All active challenges:
WNBA Flash Challenge: Walk The Line
Reward: Jordin Canada S4 Moment
Deadline: TODAY at 10 AM PST
Brooklyn Nets Squad Goals Crafting Challenge
Reward: Blake Griffin
Deadline: Friday, July 8 @ 10 AM PST
Sacramento Kings Squad Goals Crafting Challenge
Reward: Donte Divencenzo
Deadline: Friday, July 8 @ 10 AM PST
TFM + 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 🗣
🎧 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
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