Over the past year, non-fungible tokens have become a golden-ticket item for the sports industry. Advancing its NFT propaganda, The NBA is set to release a collection of new, dynamic NFTs for the 2022 playoffs titled ‘The Association’.
The Association will consist of a total of 18,000 ‘dynamic’ Ethereum NFTs, split into 75 different NFTs for each player in the 16 teams participating in this year’s playoff. Dynamic NFTs, like the name, suggests, keep evolving as compared to their ‘static’ counterparts. Traits and data in these NFTs can be continually altered, changing their appearance over time.
In a statement on Wednesday, the NBA said “The Association is a collection of dynamic NFTs that change in appearance over time based on team and player on-court performance.” This means that individual statistics, such as blocks, dunks, and assists will revamp a player’s NFT image.
To keep up to date with the latest player statics, ‘The Association’ will use Chainlink’s data feed oracle. The Verifiable Random Function (VRF) will also assign these NFTs randomly to users, meaning that no one will know which NBA player they will receive before the reveal.
After the presale minting begins, the NFT art will be public on 22 April and available on the NFT marketplace OpenSea.
NBA – NFT Love Affair?
Notably, NBA snuffed out the opportunities in NFT before they even became mainstream. In 2020, the NBA launched the NBA NFT marketplace, Top Shot, with the help of Canadian-based blockchain developers, Dapper Labs. Top Shots allows fans to buy, sell and trade NBA moments, which are highlight clips that function like trading cards.
The sports body has even kept up-to-date with recent trends in the industry. More recently, the NBA launched a Discord channel called NBA x NFT to engage fans with Web3 and basketball developments.