Dapper Labs
NBA Top Shot has continued to grow amid the NFT boom of 2021, and on Friday the Dapper Labs product announced it would give collectors something new to do with their moments that may significantly alter the company’s marketplace.
Top Shot announced on Friday that it would let collectors trade in moments for “Trade Tickets” which can be used for entry in new pack drops and other products for sale through Top Shot over the coming months. It’s a huge new feature for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that it presumably allows collectors to trade their moments in for a new form of currency in the marketplace.
Each Moment will be worth exactly one Trade Ticket, and collectors will be able to use Trade Tickets to acquire exclusive packs that are only available with Trade Tickets.
Whether it’s a common, rare, or legendary Moment from your collection, all will be exchangeable for a single identical Trade Ticket. Trading in your Moments will be the only way to obtain Trade Tickets as they will not be sold by us nor transferable between collectors.
With every moment worth a single Trade Ticket, the news in theory gives new value to some of the cheapest moments currently on the market. While initially seeing a surge in prices as popularity of the platform skyrocketed, subsequent new releases and other market movement has brought prices back down to single digits for some of the most common Top Shot moments on the market. But many of those moments, even those with a circulation of 35,000+, initially saw a boost of a dollar or so in the immediate aftermath of the news according to Evaluate.Market. Trading these in for Trade Tickets would, at least in theory, take scores of low value moments off the market and give collectors with unwanted moments a chance to get something potentially more valuable with their Trade Tickets.
That’s because Top Shot framed the news as a way to get some very rare and valuable moments into the hands of collectors: unpurchased moments from its Season One release. Typically some of the most valued, and rare, moments on the market, there are still a number of packs left unsold from the earlier days of the beta, which began in earnest in October of 2020. Those packs would be the first to hit the market, and collectors would only be eligible to buy them if they had Trade Tickets in hand.
We’ll have just over 10,000 Series 1 Reserve packs loaded with coveted Moments from early in our beta that we are eager to make available to the community. About 70% of them will be distributed via new Trade Ticket queues, with the rest being reserved for future promotion. We will start rolling out these packs for distribution in the next few months and expect to complete distribution of all of these Series 1 Moments by the end of November, 2022.
There will be Trade Ticket-only pack drops that will function similarly to current pack drops. Hopeful collectors with enough requisite Trade Tickets in their account will gather in a waiting room and get randomly placed in a queue. For these queues, you will only be able to acquire packs with Trade Tickets. To repeat, you will not be able to use Dapper Balance or credit cards to purchase packs from Trade Ticket queues.
That 18-month timeline means it won’t be a mad dash to burn moments into tickets, but it will certainly cause some changes in what’s been the most active and valuable NFT marketplace on the internet. Dapper Labs community lead Jacob Eisenberg provided more context to the move on Friday, writing on Twitter that he expects demand to “far exceed” supply of Season One packs but that those who miss the chance to buy them with Trade Tickets will still get a chance to buy packs.
Collectors who aren’t lucky in the Trade Ticket queues for S1 Reserve Packs will still have the ability to purchase Trade-in Packs in these queues.
— Jacob Eisenberg (@Eisenberg43) April 30, 2021
In recent weeks, the Top Shot has started selling “rebound packs” of more common moments to those who have missed out on rare or legendary pack drops. That looks like something that will continue with these drops as well, though missing out on a pack of Season One moments after all that work trading in tickets will be a tough loss to take for the many who will try to expand their collections, both of moments and Trade Tickets, in the coming months.
