Mamba & Mambacita Foundation could benefit big from Kobe-inspired NFT

In the NBA Top Shot market, there have been about $600 million in sales, with the most valuable item being a LeBron James dunk NFT (Series HOLO MMXX) worth approximately $1 million, according to Sportsnaut.com. A new edition of Top Shot packs is being released Friday at 3 p.m. EDT. 

Top Shot is an online marketplace where sports fans can buy and sell video highlights of basketball players. It became so popular this spring that players themselves joined in, collecting video moments and persuading teammates to buy into the crypto phenomenon. Top Shot Moments are on a blockchain, a digital ledger that records cryptocurrency transactions, which makes it possible for people to own and exchange them as if they were trading cards. About 50 NBA players have reportedly created Top Shot accounts.

The trend is an engaging and expensive way for fans and players to celebrate exciting basketball plays, and is a moneymaker for the NBA.

NFTs are digital assets. They can be JPEGs of pixelated characters and/or also include anything online, such as art, collectibles and even memes. Each NFT is represented by code on a blockchain, which tracks each time an NFT is bought and sold. In the NBA realm, Top Shot has been one of the most popular projects, as anyone who listens to colleague Alex Kennedy’s podcast (NBA Top Shot Weekly) can attest.

PFP (profile picture) projects have seen an astronomical rise in popularity. A Top Shot project typically offers 10,000 NFTs for minting, and no two pieces of the collection are the same.

In the new Bryant endeavor, the team behind KB24 NFT declared that all proceeds from the initial drop and every aftermarket sale on OpenSea would be donated to the M&M Foundation.

The KB24 NFT Team announced last Thursday that the foundation has given the project its blessing. 

“I’m honestly amazed at how fast the KB24 community has grown and how engaged they are with each other. I haven't fully immersed myself in the NFT world just yet, but this is a movement that carries more significance than just another piece of art," TNT broadcaster Kenny Smith said.

The project’s Discord channel has more than 25,000 users, and if all 10,000 KB24 NFTs are sold, between $2 and $3 million will be raised for foundation, which provides funding and sports programming for underserved athletes to enable participation in youth and league sports. Among the sponsors are the Los Angeles Lakers, Nike, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Spectrum SportsNet. The partnership even gained a pair of front-row Lakers tickets as part of this initiative.

Current and former NBA players — Dwight Howard of the Lakers, Danny Green of the Philadelphia 76ers, Nerlens Noel of the New York Knicks and Metta Sandiford-Artest (formerly known as Metta World Peace and Ron Artest) have all voiced public support for the KB24 NFT project.

Part of a larger online frenzy for cryptocurrencies and NFTs, Top Shot’s marketplace has generated $589 million in sales since it opened in October, according to Dapper Labs, the company working with the NBA to produce the viral trend. 

Dapper and the league make money through the sale of the digital "Moments," which are given serial numbers and released in occasional “drops” that draw tens of thousands of people hoping for a chance to buy digital packs of them. Dapper and the NBA also share in a 5% cut of the profit whenever a Moment is resold, according to The New York Times.

Spencer Dinwiddie of the Washington Wizards has been one of the NBA players at the forefront of investing in cryptocurrencies, which NFTs technically fall under category-wise. Skeptics believe it is a bubble-economic sector; however, players including Kevin Durant, Terrence Ross, Damion Lee and Andre Iguodala have invested in Dapper, which recently went through a fundraising round that was expected to value the company at $7.5 million.

The Kobe collection could take this market to a whole new level. The winners there would be the beneficiaries of the Mamba & Mambacita Foundation, which is operating in this space without seeking a profit, making it an outlier compared to the rest.

But when it comes to preserving Bryant’s legacy, anything that funds it and keeps it in the public spotlight should be considered a good thing.