Sorare NBA Heats up for Season 2🏆
Featuring Sorare's Head of Product, NHL's "Play Hub", Top Shot's Historical Sell Out, and Reignmakers catching fire.
Whats up TFM fam!
It’s the weekend yet again and already Week 4 of the NFL Season. It’s also the end of the month, meaning that we’re rolling over into October which will deliver the MLB Playoffs, the NHL Season, and of course, another wonderful NBA Campaign.
This week has not been without intrigue on the NFT front, as Sorare has finally rolled out part of its plan for a second season of hoops action.
Of note in Season 2 of Sorare NBA:
Major reduction in supply (Example: Rares will be down from 1,000 to 100).
Rotating Tournaments, and more ways to play.
“Collection Game”, similar to Sorare Football, where completing sets will boost the scoring of certain cards.
And of course, Cash Rewards 💵
For a long time, Sorare’s prize structure had one glaring major issue: the prizes were just more NFTs, thus massively inflating supply as the season went on. We saw this last year on the NBA front as values (and participation) plummeted into the new year.
But now with Cash Rewards, the platform can finally attract the DFS sharps from the likes of Draft Kings and Fan Duel, along with the added utility of NFT ownership.
Sorare also rolled out their Head of Product, Kate Schrumpf, for an interview on the Sorare Data podcast with Andrew Laird. You can check it out here and scope my recap below where she discusses the ups and downs of Season 1, and what growth looks like for them in Series 2 and beyond.
Now, onto the stories of the week, including:
NHL Breakaway Launches “Play Hub”.
Top Shot Sells Out Historical Plays.
Draft Kings Reignmakers Going Off.
TFM Media Pass Schedule: UPDATE.
🏒 NHL Breakaway Launches “Play Hub”
Better late than never, NHL!
With the season just over a week away, NHL Breakaway has unveiled their dashboard experience on the platform.
Along with the new display also comes actual “challenges”, where you can you “freeze” (lock) the highlights to earn a reward with a twist - there is a limited amount, and the serial #s are awarded in order of completion.
The platform has also released PreSeason Starter Packs for just $15 a piece, which contain 6x highlights and feature a 4% chance at an Epic.
Not a bad way to kick off a season.
Although there is not yet a marketplace for the NFTs (or packs), Breakaway has actually enabled a gifting feature where the highlights can be traded OTC.
💰 Top Shot Sells Out Historical Plays
Listen, I won’t bore you with the same old LG-narrative about Top Shot (re: supply and product market fit).
Fact of the matter is that despite community sentiment and account values, the platform continues to sell out virtually every single drop.
This time, it came in the form of Historical plays from the 2014-19 seasons in the NBA, introduced across 3x different rarity tiers and each with their own challenges. The Kawhi shot will also appear in this collection as a challenge reward.
The drop comes on the heels of several weeks of Anthology drops, which also featured historical plays from LeBron and Steph Curry, albeit in a different format.
Wembanyama Looms
While we’re talking Top Shot, I thought this tweet from Nest Analytics suggested an interesting approach to the most anticipated rookie in recent memory.
Top Shot has not yet rolled out plans for Series 5, but hopefully they stick to their promise of 4k rookies (although still quite high a mint count).
This type of burn dynamic would be fantastic and certainly make Wemby’s rookie card quite the item to own.
For some context, Wemby had his first Rare rookie card sold at Sorare auction last summer following the draft, where it went for 9.99 ETH.
🏆 Draft Kings Reignmakers Going Off
We don’t cover Reignmakers as much as we should on TFM, despite them ranking highly on our monthly charts.
The platform has kicked off its second ever NFL campaign in style with several pack sell outs and some very high profile sales.
In fact, they’ve recorded 22 secondary marketplace sales above $10k since late July, most of them coming for 1/1 or 2/2 cards that can be used in contests this season.
It makes sense though, given that RM is a fantasy platform first and an NFT platform second. The prizes alone are enough to attract the larger whale accounts out there.
If you want to learn more about DK Reignmakers, check out Pet Berisha’s article on the platform.
💳 TFM Media Pass Schedule: UPDATE
The first ever season of The First Mint Media Pass is underway, and we’re already almost halfway through!
Last week we made some changes to the live stream schedule, which will now conclude on November 1st (4x weeks early).
All non-streaming passes will still be valid until the original close date of November 28th, meaning you’ve still got 2 months to get featured on The First Mint via Twitter, Podcast, or even in this newsletter.
The First Mint network is growing!
We’ll be featuring the top content from our friends around the network in this section of the newsletter every week. And yes, some of it will be from us too.
Starting with our newest network show, All Night NFT, and their latest spaces on the state of the NFL ALL DAY market:
Outside of NFL, lets head over to our Twitter for a vital question to our community:
Last, our comment back to Boys Club about the sports NFT world:
**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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