Tip-Off Thrills 🎢
Featuring Sports Overload, A Top Shot Catch-Up Cram Session, Massive Sorare Sales & More
Good Morning, B&B Ballers! Cheers to the weekend, and hope you’ve enjoyed the start of the 2022-23 NBA season as much as I have!
For sports fans, it doesn’t get much better than right now — the NBA and NHL are back, NFL is in the meat of the season, MLB playoffs… Too much good stuff!
Me, when that sports dopamine hits:
Lot’s to cover today — so let’s get into all the action from the last few days:
P.S. — ICYMI, Wednesday’s Comprehensive Guide to Fantasy Basketball NFTs replaced the regular newsletter programming. Check it out if you haven’t already!
Top Shot Tip-Off 🏁
There has been a LOT of Top Shot information released since the last Basketball & Blockchain, so I’ll do my best to get everyone all caught up:
🗺 Roadmap Release — the highly-anticipated Series 4 Roadmap was released on Monday, giving collectors an outlook for the new season.
Nothing too surprising in there, with the focus being on many of the hot-button issues in the community — scarcity, burning and gamification. Details:
🏆 Series 4 Challenges — It sounds like there will be lots of content coming our way this season, with Top Shot adding more gamification ways to follow along with the NBA action.
In addition to the near-everyday cadence, there are also several types of challenges this year — requiring a mix of holding, burning and locking moments to earn a reward moment.
‘The Challenge’ Fandom set (where the flash challenge rewards will fall) has been broken up into three tiers based on mint size this season:
1-999 completions — The Challenge: Champion
1,000-3,999 completions — The Challenge: Icon
4,000+ completions — The Challenge: Pro
The first two challenges of the season fired up the burn, with Zion Williamson and Jayson Tatum moments from each respective night (cool to see such quick mints!) removing nearly 30k moments:
Similar to NFL All Day, Top Shot also introduced Predictions, which will be free to enter and have moments available to earn.
✈️ The Tour — Break out your physical roadmaps! Top Shot is e, with a four-city tour that will feature “one-of-a-kind Top Shot experiences, player and staff appearances, exclusive packs, and Top Shot giveaways”. Tour stops:
Portland – Weekend of 12/10/22 (Portland Trail Blazers vs. Minnesota Timberwolves)
Toronto – Weekend of 12/18/22 (Toronto Raptors vs. Golden State Warriors)
Miami - Weekend of 1/8/23 (Miami Heat vs. Brooklyn Nets)
Paris – Week of 1/19/23 (Detroit Pistons vs. Chicago Bulls)
📦 Drops & Packs — Top Shot released a new blog on Wednesday, detailing some new S4 changes to the release of moments.
New Hot Packs will be ‘constantly available throughout the season’ for $10 a piece, and will contain a mix of rarities and types of moments.
Also included in Hot Packs will be Parallel moments, a new type of ‘upgraded’ common that will feature the same highlight as the base moment, but with different artwork and minted to a lower number as a ‘sub edition’. This was designed to mimic special inserts seen in the physical card market. Don’t really understand the need for this one, but moving on!
Additionally, RSVP packs will be back in S4— allowing users to avoid having to wait in line for certain drops.
But wait… There’s more!
The winners of the Top Shot x Magic Johnson experience headed to the mansion on Friday, for what looked like a pretty surreal night.
There was a flash challenge of sorts on Friday afternoon, allowing 1,000 collectors to burn two Rare moments for… NBA League Pass! Love this type of utility — a nice cross-promotion that encapsulates the fandom experience perfectly, enabling collectors to watch more game action. Well done. There will be another opportunity specifically geared to the International timezones, which is a nice touch.
Think that covers the Top Shot updates, but a nice busy start to Series 4 from a content perspective!
Sorare Streets 🚥
Tuesday marked the launch of the Sorare NBA product, which came out hot with an extremely polished opening community event.
A good thread primer on the how the platform works, for those who aren’t familiar:
With all primary sales happening via auction, we saw an early massive bid on the 1/100 Giannis:
The auction house is addicting, creating a game within a game to secure the players you want at the right price. If you’re a night owl — bargain hunting during the off-times for America is a fun time to search for deals!
The first game window began with Friday’s slate, which started with only common cards. The next game week (starting on Monday, Oct. 24) expands the field, with limited and rare contests available to those with the available cards in their squad.
Around The First Mint 🗣
🎧 Steph Curry’s Multi-Billion Dollar Future in Crypto
📜 The Comprehensive Guide to Fantasy Basketball NFTs
🎧 The Future of Ownership (Feat. Jess Sloss)
🎧 How Premint is Making NFTs Less Painful (Feat. Brenden Mulligan)
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.”
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