Stupefy: NBA Top Shot and Non-Sports

Earlier in the week I wrote about art rushing to turn itself into digital collectibles.

Art is following sports.

NBA Top Shot, a joint venture between the NBA and a tech company to sell videos depicting specific moments in NBA history as digital versions of collectible trading cards, is an explosive hit.

They're just videos. But someone paid $100,000 for just one, NBA Top Shot has sold $11 million worth of "packs" and the cards in those packs traded for $70 million more on the secondary marketplace.

I think there are two forces at work: one is a media force and one is a social force.

Media force
Wherever there was an industry there is now a "space." The art space. The sports space. The music space. The esports space. The fashion space.

A space, in the context of media and entertainment, means content, content about or consisting of or appealing to fans of that particular section of culture. Think about an activation around "the streetwear space." It will end up mostly as content.

And wherever there is content, it can be owned now, thanks to NFTs.

Because content is eating industries that traditionally sell physical goods and turning them into spaces, the most beloved and hype-fueled spaces will become consumed with the buying and selling of digital content.

Art and sports are just the first.

In fashion, hyped up pieces are already traded like equities. In esports, fans are used to paying for badges that show how early or how dedicated they are to certain communities. In TV and film, gifs are regularly traded for free.

I could easily see a Ninja digital collectible, like a video of a first or famous headshot or squad wipe, being minted as an NFT to be sold and re-sold as a digital collectible video.

Why not a piece of streetwear content, then? Or, merging music and fashion, a famous outfit from an iconic music video? Or a moment from, say, "The Office," declared original or authentic in some way by the show itself?

Social force
Important to NBA Top Shot's wild success is that these digital trading cards can be re-sold.

Young people have very little to do right now, a certain amount of economic desperation and complete loss of faith in traditional systems. These are some of the same conditions that fueled the GameStop story and Bitcoin's rise to $50K.

All three can look like a get-rich quick scheme for people obsessed with and committed to something enough to will it into being together.

But all three stories are also about what Mark Cuban calls the store of value generation kicking your ass. It might be true in the case of NBA Top Shot. In the case of the art market, we'll see how much of an ass kicking the establishment takes when one of its members buys Beeple at Christie's for multiple millions and holds onto it.

NBA Top Shot and Non-Sports

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