June 2021

Time To Go With The Flow

Hey everyone! Pretty excited to get this blog up and running. During the pandemic, and down and out with a bout of long covid there wasn't a whole lot I could do while being bed ridden. I came across NBA Top Shot from a Ringer podcast and started dabbling around wondering what on Earth they were talking about. It was very early days for Top Shot, they had Tyler Herro vouching for it, which really helped because I was really trying to make sure this was actually a legit NBA licensed product.

And not going to lie, it took a few days for me to get comfortable with it. I kept checking back every once in a while and really wanted to understand every little detail.

Why were some moments CC and others LE?
Why is this LeBron way more expensive than this other one?
When I purchase it, what happens to it? Where do I store it?

There wasn't a whole lot of information anywhere. I was so intrigued but nobody I knew in real life had any idea what it was. I only used Twitter for the last 10 years, sparingly, when I was stuck in traffic or on the sky train and wondering why there was a delay. I've never heard of Discord before...but I really wanted to buy a moment and just see what this was all about. I ended up buying a Jaylen Brown S2 common moment for about $5. It was really easy to set up and use my credit card. It told me my purchase was successful, and I went to see the exact moment I collected for myself and EVERYTHING clicked.

I was amazed at this whole concept of having digital moments, that I own a piece of NBA history, granted, it was just a Jaylen Brown jump shot in a random regular season game. But I had to figure out more about what a NFT is. I immediately downloaded Discord and lurked around the message boards. I started following lots of these people on Twitter and started to understand this whole "GM" thing, and the culty vibes that surrounded this whole new technology. I'll never forget how I felt realizing just how fucking big this was going to all be.

And fast forward nearly 3 years later, Web3 and NFT's are still in their infancy. There's been an insane amount of ups and downs in the space - and it's been an absolute nightmare trying to onboard new people because on the news all you hear about is scam after scam after scam. NFTs make the most sense right now in video games, but the video game community wants nothing to do with "crypto bros" who've relentlessly tried to shill their Bored Apes, among the literally thousands of .jpeg derivatives that have entered the fray.

Ponzi scheme this. Wallet got hacked that. Influencers sucking all the liquidity out of the market.

It's been brutal.

And it sucks, because there's actually some really good stuff out there with some legitimacy to it. Flow has actual IP's that people know and love deep diving into their blockchain (trust me, you've heard of them I'll show you later). While everything else went silent, they've been constantly building towards the future still with their products and chain. It all circles back to NBA Top Shot - it's honestly night and day compared to what the site was like when I first found my way there. Now you have Doris Burke, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson commenting on their moments. You have digital autographs on some of them too. The site looks incredible and there's absolutely no question that this isn't a licensed product.

Flow and Dapper Labs are continuing to innovate and push the space forward. And this blog will be in large part me just witnessing the journey that lays ahead and sharing my thoughts and feelings about how things are going down.

It's a bumpy road, but I really hope you'll enjoy the ride.

It all circles back to NBA Top Shot...The site looks incredible and there's absolutely no question that this isn't a licensed product.