The Prices of NBA NFTs Are Tumbling. Here’s One Way to Make Them More Valuable

If Top Shot wants to appeal to collectors instead of speculators, it should take a page from NFL Films

James Surowiecki
Marker

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NBA Top Shot home page

Prices at NBA Top Shot, where you can buy and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs) of NBA highlights, have cratered in the past couple of weeks, part of what appears to be a broader sell-off in risky assets of many kinds, including high-flying tech stocks and cryptoassets.

This isn’t exactly shocking, given that, as I wrote a few weeks ago in Marker, the market for NFTs appears to be dominated already by speculators, rather than collectors, which means that when prices start to fall, there’s no source of fundamental demand to keep them up. But the decline in Top Shot prices, in particular, underscores one of the peculiar things about Top Shot Moments, namely that they aren’t all that distinctive, other than the fact that they’re certified by the site. And that, as it turns out, is something Top Shot can, and should, remedy.

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James Surowiecki
Marker
Writer for

I’m the author of The Wisdom of Crowds. I’ve been a business columnist for Slate and The New Yorker and written for a wide range of other publications.