Thomas Coex
- NBA Top Shots, the second-biggest NFT marketplace, will sell moments from Summer League basketball games in Las Vegas.
- It will be the first time the platform has created NFTs of great plays of games that fans have seen in person.
- Sports teams are turning to NFTs as a way to generate more revenue from their fanbase.
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NBA Top Shot will sell highlights from the upcoming Summer League basketball competition as non-fungible tokens for the first time, it said on Tuesday.
The NFTs will feature outstanding play "moments" from three days of games at the NBA Summer League meet in Las Vegas, those on August 8-10. Fans will be able to pre-order the $5 moments from a kiosk at the venue.
"For the first time ever, NBA Top Shot fans will have the ability to purchase a moment in an arena, and receive a moment from a game they saw in-person," the company said in its statement.
NBA Top Shot will let collectors know which games the NFTs will be from in advance. There will be a minimum of 1,000 and possibly more based on demand from fans, who will be able to purchase up to 10 moments per day.
All 30 NBA teams will compete in the Summer League, which features 75 games over 10 days in total.
The move is another key step in NFT adoption in sports. The Golden State Warriors basketball team launched a NFT collection in April this year as a way to generate more revenue.
Until now, NBA Top Shot sold NFT videos of highlights from previous basketball games. It was started in 2019 by the National Basketball Association and Dapper Labs, the creator of NFTs such as CryptoKitties and the Flow blockchain.
NBA Top Shot is one of the biggest NFT marketplaces, recent data shows. In the month to August 4, it hosted 109,351 traders and carried out 671,149 sales, according to DappRadar. However, those tallies were down month-on-month by 35.15% and 53.39%, respectively.
In March, NBA Top Shot closed a $305 million funding round with investments from the likes of actor Will Smith and former NBA all-star Michael Jordan.
NFTs are unique digital tokens that represent real-world assets like video, audio or pieces of artwork, among others. They are a form of collector's item that are based on blockchain networks, much like cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Unlike cryptocurrencies, though, they are not mutually interchangeable.
