NFT-Trailblazing NBA Looks to Lure Basketball Fans Into the Metaverse

There’s a pretty fair argument to be made that the National Basketball Association played a vital role in helping move NFTs from the crypto world into the mainstream.

The nonfungible tokens are everywhere now, as celebrities from rapper Ice Cube to artist Jeff Koons get in on the trend while brands from Coca-Cola to Louis Vuitton dive into the metaverse.

See also: PYMNTS Metaverse Series: The Brands Are There. Will Eyeballs Follow?

But the NBA Top Shots NFT line, launched in late 2020, was the first to break into the mainstream in a big way, as the highlight video tokens attracted fans who’d never even dabbled in crypto — helped along by league promotions like announcers hollering “that’s gonna be a Top Shot” after a particularly spectacular slam dunk.

So it’s worth noting that the NBA is expanding beyond its Top Shots Partnership with sports-focused NFT developer Dapper Labs to create NBAxNFT, which at the moment is a playoff themed promotion with a Twitter account and Discord server — crypto’s social media discussion channel of choice — as well as a passel of new trademark applications under The Association banner. The latter covers everything from NFT tickets to collectables to virtual jerseys.

“We’re showcasing all things intersecting basketball and web3, including NFTs, gaming, and the metaverse,” the league tweeted.

🏀 Welcome to NBAxNFT 🏀

We’re showcasing all things intersecting basketball and web3, including NFTs, gaming, and the metaverse.

— NBAxNFT (@NBAxNFT) April 12, 2022

While Top Shots are no longer the hottest of the hot NFT lines, they’re still a bestseller and a top 10 line according to DappRadar, which recorded more than 16 million sales and resales of Top Shots NFTS, which generated $885 million — much of it not for the NBA — at an average price of $55.

The NBA laid the foundation for much of the current activity by sports leagues from Major League Baseball to Soccer’s Premier League.

Read more: Home Run or Foul Ball? NFT Picture of Mickey Mantle’s Rookie Card Fetches $470K

Dunking on the Metaverse

And of course, the basketball league is getting itself at least prepped to jump into the metaverse, acquiring a pair of domain names — NBA.eth and theassociationnft.eth on the Ethereum Name Service. That’s a top-level domain heavily involved with Web3, the red-hot-but-questionable-for-now next generation of the internet that proponents say will be a decentralized version of today’s web where personal data will be controlled by people freed from the tyranny of big tech. Or so the theory goes.

See more: Web3: Is There Any ‘There’ There? And if so, Where Is It?

The NBA has progressed fast in its embrace of crypto, which started with the pre-NFT (at least as far as the public was concerned) flat-out rejection of Brooklyn Nets star Spencer Dinwiddie’s 2019 battle to tokenize $13.5 million of his $34 million contract, sell off crypto tokens entitling the owner to a cut — the selling point being interest plus the potential for an extra profit if he renegotiated the third year of the three-year contract.

It was helped along by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who not only launched a team line of digital collectables but started accepting bitcoin for tickets and merchandise as far back as 2019 and eventually made a bigger splash by adding trendy memecoin dogecoin. That progresses into a series of jaw-dropping stadium naming deals, with the Miami Heat bringing in $135 million from the newly renamed FTX Arena and $700 million for the Crypto.com Arena once known as the Staples Center, aka the L.A. Lakers’ home court.

But by jumping into NFTs early as the cryptocurrency/artistic medium grew from an obscurity into a powerhouse over the course of 2021, the NBA is now out in front as far as sports leagues go.

So the potential for a serious leap into a metaverse so far dominated largely by brand marketing with a big sidelight in live concerts, six- and seven-figure avatar collectables like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, and gambling could be a preview of how other leagues will come to use both NFTs and the metaverse as a whole.

The obvious step being that if millions of music fans are willing to enter a metaverse to watch an NFT version of rapper Travis Scott perform in the Fortnite MMO game/metaverse, the same could well work for live matches.

In the meantime, Lakers star LeBron James — who has the two highest-priced Top Shots NFTs, as well as a Crypto.com Web3 development deal — dropped a line of NFTs in March.

And as the regular season draws to a close, the Golden State Warriors have launched a line of playoff-themed NFTs that will change and unlock new content based on the team’s progress on the court.