In early 2021, NBA Top Shot, a company owned by Fanatics and partnered with the NBA, suddenly appeared on the internet, spreading like wildfire. Selling “Moments,’ which came in the form of NBA moments and highlights formatted like the NBA cards of yore, the company claimed their product was the ‘trading card of the future.’
In February of 2021, the average Moment cost just over $180 dollars. A man named Jesse Schwarz bought a highlight of a Lebron James dunk for $208,000, setting the platform’s record, per the Verge.
Also in 2021, the Los Angeles Lakers renamed their iconic STAPLES Center to the Crypto.com Arena, and the same sponsor put a patch on the Philadelphia 76ers’ jerseys and court. The rise of Crypto set an apocalyptic tone over the NBA last season – between NFTs being minted of every notable play and the constant ads for online sports betting, going to an NBA game last fall felt a little bit like a consumerist hellscape.
Schwarz’s Top Shot record has not yet been broken.
Now, in the so-called ‘crypto winter,’ it doesn’t look like it’ll be broken anytime soon.
In December of 2022, the average Moment costs just ten dollars – less than most of the physical NBA cards the service sought to replace. Just a month ago, Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot, laid off 22% of its 600 employees.
Per NBC: “In October, which coincided with the start of the 2022-2023 NBA season, there was $2.7 million in sales across the NBA Top Shot platform, down from $40.9 million from the previous year, a decline of 94%. The platform has seen four straight months of sales declines, and unique buyers totaled 13,462 in October, compared to 65,769 in October 2021.”
NFTs and Cryptocurrencies are unsustainable and unpredictable. Our athletes are people first, and we should not be marketing their ‘moments’ without returning any profit to them. Think NIL and the ways in which college athletes were unable to profit from their likenesses – the same thing could happen, and has happened, on a professional level with projects like Top Shot.
We’ve already seen NBA players tell bettors not to bet on them on nights they knew they wouldn’t be playing in an attempt to shake up markets and predict their own fates. The same thing is yet to come if and when platforms like Top Shot spread. Not to mention, if these platforms don’t succeed, thousands or even millions of people could get scammed by the promise of being able to resell something when in reality the opportunity doesn’t exist.
We have to think critically about what it could mean to ‘own’ an NBA player’s ‘Moment.’ Not only is it reminiscent of a scam – with the players often unaware their highlights are being made into Moments at all – it’s exploitative. The connotations of buying and selling moments of people’s lives, even when they’re millionaire athletes, opens doors for thousands of other ways intangible and non-copyrightable non-things can be digitally bought and sold.
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