LeBron James’s Highlights Sell for Thousands in Online Market

(Bloomberg) -- Starting just outside the three-point line, Memphis Grizzlies point guard Ja Morant used a crossover to freeze Aron Baynes, then a Phoenix Suns defender. Morant then makes a mad dash to the rim, switches the ball back to his right hand mid-air and finishes the play with a jaw-dropping dunk that sends fans to their feet and leaves Baynes to dejectedly run back up the court knowing he was “posterized.”

For just $43,313, you can buy one of the 25 video trading cards of the moment on NBA Top Shot, a platform marrying the trading of the league’s top highlights with cryptocurrency.

In another sign of the booming sports collectibles market -- a Mickey Mantle rookie card just sold for a record $5.2 million -- the best NBA Top Shot limited new releases are selling out in minutes and going for eye-watering prices on its secondary market. Four videos are currently listed at prices exceeding $20,000, including two versions of a vicious LeBron James dunk against the Sacramento Kings in 2019.

NBA Top Shot is a collaboration between the NBA and Dapper Labs, the Andreessen Horowitz-backed creator of the CryptoKitties game that brought the ethereum blockchain to a grinding halt in 2017.

Since launching a closed beta version last May, the Top Shot marketplace has facilitated more than $10 million in transactions, according to the company. And the pace is picking up: there’s been more than $1.3 million in trading volume in just the last week.

“The Christmas day game pack drop sold out in under a minute,” said Caty Tedman, vice president of marketing at Dapper Labs.

The sports memorabilia gold rush has come on the coattails of surging stock prices and, yes, cryptocurrency markets that are near all-time highs with investors looking for hard assets to hedge against future inflation.

While it’s not explicitly marketed to users as a crypto product, Top Shot sits atop the firm’s Flow blockchain to create a chain of custody for each moment that secures ownership and prevents forgeries.

“After launching CryptoKitties, we were quickly convinced this was the future of collectibles,” said Dapper Labs Chief Executive Officer Roham Gharegozlou. “We thought this would be the killer app that would bring people to the blockchain. We just needed to find a partner at the scale of the NBA that would let us do a first of its kind product and one that would last 100 years if we do our job right.”