The Crypto Market and NBATopShot NFTs
Crypto vs. NBATopShot
The Goal:
First and foremost, I love NBATopshot and, second, I am a weirdo that likes messing around with spreadsheets and then writing about it.
I have downloaded and looked through the NBATopshot data from CryptoSlam (all links below), and I also looked through the historical financial data of both Bitcoin and Ethereum. My goal was to establish if price spikes in these two cornerstone crypto coins had any correlation with sales and/or mass adoption for TopShot. Here is the quantitative data that I have found:
The Method:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD/history/
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ETH-USD/history/
https://www.cryptoslam.io/nba-top-shot/sales/summary
Using this chart and the data mined from these three sources, a few numbers stand out to me.
For the purpose of my dime-store analysis, I looked at a total of seven months: February 2021, March 2021, October 2021, January 2022, February 2022, October 2024, and November 2024. I picked these particular months because, for all but the last two, TS saw substantial sales spikes in or around those times.
For the last two chosen months, my focus was more on the recent performance of Bitcoin correlative to sales as a trend.
The Findings:
What I found is that in February 2021, sales were at an all time high for TS: $226,569,590.00. Then by March 2021, they proceeded to drop ever so slightly, by -0.34%. While this drop is negligible, it is counterintuitive to how the crypto market performed during the same timeframe: BTC grew 31% from $45,137.77 to $58,918.83 and ETH grew 35% from 1,416.05 to $1,918.36. At the same time, TS unique buyers grew by 131% from 176,576 to 408,388.
The user base increase surprised me as compared to the sales numbers. One would think that with a 131% parabolic rise in unique buyers, now flush with disposable BTC and ETH, it would push sales even higher. Fast forward 8 months later.
October of 2021 saw a 36% increase to BTC ($45,137.77 to $61,318.96) and a whopping 227% increase to ETH ($1,918.36 to $4,631.48). Meanwhile TS unique buyers shrank below March 2021 number by 58% (408,388 to 170,408). It even shrank below February 2021 unique buyers numbers by 3% (176,576 to 170,408).
Suffice it to say that TS market fluctuations are not tied to the larger crypto market. With that said, some weird things happened In January of 2022. BTC dropped 37% to $38k and ETH dropped 42%. At the same time, the TS unique buyer number plummeted by 34% while sales grew by 14%. Even more strange, mint counts spiked that same month by a whopping 47%.
What does it mean? To me it means that while people had less disposable income through crypto, they still spent more. In fact, the TS unique buyers that had jumped on the TopShot Train were spending more than 50,000+ unique buyers that had hopped off since October. Wild to say the least.
February 2022 saw some of the largest mint counts in TS history (3rd overall) at 3,970,695. This is a 70% increase from the month prior. Meanwhile, BTC and ETH saw gains of 12% and 22% respectively. Unique buyers increased by 24% from the month prior. Things seemed to be humming along in terms of crypto growth mirroring TS growth. Fast forward 31 months later to last month - October 2024.
October 2024 fits the pattern set back in 2021 of the crypto market not mirroring the TS market. Last month, BTC was 63% higher than in February of 2022. The TS unique buyers numbers dropped a whopping 94% in 31 months, and sales plummeted similarly by 96% to just $2,545,455.70. Interestingly, mint counts shrank by 96% during this time period.
Again, if we look at this month, November 2024, BTC has grown 28% since October 1st as did ETH. Meanwhile TS sales, estimated for the month of course (I just doubled the current sales numbers to make things easy as we are halfway through the month) will likely be down 38%.
Simple Analysis:
Clearly, it is my opinion that the crypto market is not directly linked to the success of TS. This is good in some ways in that it stands as its own niche crypto space. Originally, I had thought that crypto was crypto, that blockchain was blockchain, but this is clearly not the case. I think people see this is as its own thing, separate from the crypto space macro. To me, this is a healthy sign of a perfect blockchain use case. It really isn’t crypto, it is a collectible. While November isn’t over, and BTC could be on a roll going into the next four years of a crypto friendly administration, we will truly begin to see if a bull crypto market can carry blockchain sub-communities such as NFLAllDay and NBATopShot. I am curious if these same patterns emerge for BoredApeClub NFTs or Crypto Punks. Those are collectible as well. However, something tells me that these are more closely tied to the patterns of the crypto market at large.
My next short article: my qualitative analysis of where we came from, where we are, and where we are going. Stay tuned!
