It should be a good thing, but the surge in demand for the NBA Top Shot crypto basketball collectibles seems to be overwhelming as per the project executives. This was according to Caty Tedman of Dapper Lab.
It all started with Dapper Labs’ CryptoKitties NFT, and now the popularity has rolled over to NBA Top Shot. People are interested in the rare digital games, and as a result, the executives of the latest Dapper Labs’ NFT collectibles play have bitten more than they could chew. The demand has surged so much that it took them by surprise.
NBA Top Shot was launched in May, and in October 2020, the public began to access it. At the beginning of 2021, the game had tens of thousands of users but as of last week, it is recording at least 500,000 users.
This growth has made it the most popular amongst all decentralized apps. Even in the last 30 days, the dApp has recorded at least $255 million in sales.
The NBA Top Shot Project, Is It Legit or a Bubble?
The popularity of digital collectibles keeps rising every day. In collectibles, users buy random “moments” in packs or buy tokenized video highlights of NBA players. This is the same interest seen in NFTs collectible artworks and rare items seen in crypto games. But critics are not impressed with the growth.
Instead, they’re wondering if it’s all a bubble. According to them, these NFTs may just be another get-rich-quick scheme like what happened in the 2017 ICO bubble.
But according to Dapper Labs, the team was expecting NBA Top Shot to be widely accepted but not at this speed. Due to the speed, there has been a lot of pressure in the marketplace. Many signups are not going through, and users find it difficult to withdraw their funds.
Right now, the company is in a race to address all the challenges it’s having. According to Caty Tedman, the Head of Marketing & Partnerships, they expected the demand but not this fast. They can’t even handle all the customer care tickets flooding the systems because even before all these, they haven’t set a system for it.
Implications of Sudden Surge in Demand
Even though Ted recognizes that great demand is a good thing, he’s also pointing out that it’s straining the system. The team hasn’t even put all infrastructure in place to facilitate operations.
They have many accounts to verify so that users can withdraw money. Also, new pack drops are problematic to the system, and they’re also fighting off bots trying to disrupt the system too.
Dapper Labs seem to be fighting against bad actors and bots. But they’re trying to bring in experts and also expand the team handling operations.
Moreover, Tedman stated that Flow blockchain wasn’t the cause of the issues they’re having. According to him, the blockchain is “humming.” But the project seems to be having an attack similar to a DDOS attack whenever the company announces anything.
Another implication of the surge for the NBA Top Shot is that it has changed the company’s plans. All the feature enhancements they planned have been dropped because they’re in a race to improve the user experience for NBA Top Shot. This is because even with all the scalability issues they’re facing, hundreds of thousands queued in digital rooms to secure new moments.
Collaborating With NBA
According to Tedman, their collaboration with NBA has been amazing. Recently, the two companies collaborated to release the latest season of the NBA Rising Stars roosters. Thus Tedman is expressing their satisfaction with how the NBA is cooperating with them. Without the NBA’s support, they couldn’t have seen the Rising Stars opportunity.
So, Tedman believes that as time goes by, the relationship will deepen to produce special things. Even with the issues the company is having with the sudden rise in demand, Tedman envisages a larger prize in the future.
According to him, NBA Top Shot aims for a global reach, not just NBA fans. But the company wants to ensure that users won’t spend so much for the experience. Moreover, they’ll ensure that NFT collectibles will mean something much deeper and long-lasting for users and never a bubble
