Victors and VIPs 🤩
Victors and VIPs 🤩
Featuring NBA Returns, Victor Wembanyana Hype, VIP Chats, VIP Experiences, A Jayne Sighting & More
Good Morning, B&B Ballers! Basketball is in the air, can you feel it!?!?
The preseason is here, and MAN it is good to see some familiar faces on the court after long layoffs. Players like Kawhi Leonard, Jamal Murray, Ben Simmons, Zion Williamson, Michael Porter Jr. are all finally back, and the league is better for it.
Some other fun tidbits around the hardwood:
The Phoenix Suns had a rough opening to the preseason, losing to the Adelaide 36ers (from the Australian NBL) 136-126. The Suns were favored by 28!
NBA on ESPN debuted a new theme song for this year’s coverage — fans were not pleased.
Steph Curry is now a playable character in the latest PGA Tour 2K23 game. If you didn’t know, the man is a multi-sport athlete.
Top 2023 prospect Victor Wenbanyama played against the G-League Ignite squad — he is not human.
Let’s get into all the action from the last few days:
VIP Visits 🗣
After quiet comms and contentious few weeks in the Top Shot streets, the team hopped in a chat with the VIPs to provide some insights into the coming season.
A thread with the highlights:
Some other notable points (full doc available here):
Burning will play a ‘significant role’, and the net-neutral supply isn’t a “one-in, one-out license to mint”. Scarcity is a priority in S4.
The upcoming S4 roadmap will be ‘more light’ than in the past, to allow for flexibility.
AMA chats will now move to Reddit (🤔) in an effort to “support collectors where they feel comfortable connecting with the product”. I read that as ‘we want to avoid the hate we receive on Twitter and Discord, so let’s try Reddit’.
On S4 pack drops: “Smaller drops more consistently. We know that pack drops are our most effective way to bring in a new user so looking into pre-paying, small drops similar to early 2021. TSS gates will be dynamic and grow through the season as we get to the best content”.
With account values continuing to bleed (MC down to $470M) and a lot of early adopters/whales aggressively selling, Top Shot certainly has its work cut out for it over the upcoming season. And all eyes will be on the Series 4 roadmap, which should be arriving any day now.
Cooking With Cade 👨🍳
In other VIP news… Top Shot announced the winners of the Cade Cunningham experience, with some familiar names making the trip:
Two previous podcast guests and Top Shot whales, Steve Veerman and Alxo, are amongst those that will get to cook with Cade (literally) in the unique reward. With a large majority of leaderboards likely dominated by the same group of top collectors, it’ll be interesting to see how TS can spread the wealth.
When the Player Leaderboards dropped a few weeks ago, I had ripped the launch a bit for the rewards seeming to be mostly moment-based. But I think the IRL stuff like this Cunningham experience is where Top Shot really excels.
Congrats to the winners, who will head to Detroit for a group cooking experience with Cade, amongst other goodies:
NBA Athlete Meet & Greet with Cade Cunningham, where the winners (and their plus ones) will attend a group cooking experience in Detroit, MI
An officially licensed Cade Cunningham jersey for you and your guest
Suite access for you and your guest to the Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Detroit Pistons preseason game on October 11, 2022
Jayne Returns to Twitter 🐦
After a brief hiatus from the bird app, Top Shot GM Jayne Peressini returned on Tuesday night in spicy fashion.
In response to a critical post, Jayne waded back into the hostile Twitter streets — with a series of tweets that were the full Top Shot experience
In addition to the above tweets, we also got this one in a separate response:
I simultaneously feel for Jayne and the Top Shot team, while also wanting to bang my head against a wall at the constantly strange comms.
In the Web3 world, shitposting and contentious tweets are accepted, and often celebrated. Maybe it’s the NBA license or the more Web2 feel, but passive aggressive replies to users like above just feel awkward to me in this situation.
Sentiment is as bad as I’ve seen right now, and silence is better than anger — which is only going to feed the trolls and bring additional hate.
We’ve been here before — it’s exhausting.
In other unrelated better news, here’s a cool video of international TS collector @ginobilisaurus showing Dejounte Murray his moment:
Around The First Mint 🗣
ICYMI, a note from LG:
🎧 The Future of Ownership (Feat. Jess Sloss)
🎧 How Premint is Making NFTs Less Painful (Feat. Brenden Mulligan)
🎧 Is NFL All Day the Answer to Sports NFTs? (Feat. Dave Feldman)
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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