It was July 2019, when the NBA teamed up with Dapper Labs to develop the "NBA Top Shots".
The first betas date back to May 2020, while they were only made available to the public in October 2020. In recent weeks, popularity has exploded to the point of bringing the number of users from a few tens of thousands to over half a million!
The NBA is one of the many sports that has embraced the digital age and with this "NBA top Shot" initiative, has given a huge boost to digital collectibles.
What is it about?
In a full technological evolution, the idea of the NBA was to subvert the concept of the "sticker album" (Panini is famous here in Italy).
Instead of the player's photograph, in this case highlights of the matches are immortalized. An added value to the already particular digital token that embodies the image; in fact it could only be an NFT.
In practice, in addition to being the owners of that scene that is absolutely impossible to repeat, we have full ownership through an NFT that guarantees us, moreover, that it can never be copied or modified.
In short, an "authentic uniqueness"!
Let's say that so far there is nothing new and much less sensational, just think of Beeple's work: a single image that contains all the images that the author published on Twitter from 1 May 2007 to 7 January 2021 .
The tokenized representation of this work sold for a whopping 69 million dollars.
Mind-boggling figures, but uniqueness, unfortunately, has a cost; in this case, no forger can create a copy by passing it off as real: the hash of that token will always be different, and therefore the cheat is immediately discovered.
So what's noteworthy what is it?
The blockchain on which this token was made.
We talk about the blockchain of Dapper Labs, better known as Flow; this blockchain stands out for its particular form of consensus which is different from both Btc, which uses the classic Proof Of Work (PoW) and from the consensus used by Algo which uses the Prof Of Stake (PoS)
Flow has a different consent method that uses the two types of consent in parallel; in this case, each node is not required to declare the update before finalizing the block, but they set the order of the transaction during the calculation process. With this system, each node is allowed to deduce the update locally regardless of the finalization of the block.
But I think I will dedicate another article to this as it is very fascinating and deserves a space of its own.
Well, but I can easily download these NBA Top Shots from Google without spending a lot of $ as has already happened for some shots ...
Sure, very true, but then you didn't understand a damn thing about what's behind it.
Behind this image that you can download from Google, there are lines of code that define its uniqueness, originality and ownership.
Once you have bought it, it is yours ONLY yours and NO ONE can say anything different: real ownership + authenticity! As George Clooney would say: “What else?”
This is the difference, this is the concept of NFTs