It’s been about 18 months since NBA Top Shot digital collectibles helped usher NFTs into the wider public consciousness.

In that time, the non-fungible token market exploded in popularity among collectors and speculators, creating a classic American get-rich-quick narrative and the blowback criticism that NFTs are both environmentally unsound and their economics can be harmful for latecomers.

Now, the maker of NBA Top Shot is launching a new product in partnership with the nation’s most powerful sports property, the National Football League. Vancouver-based Dapper Labs, the NFL and its players union on Thursday will debut the “NFL All Day” NFT product — licensed and slickly packaged video highlights of great plays and other content.

The first NFL All Day highlights go on sale at 2 p.m. Friday. The project was announced in September 2021.

Both the union and league have equity stakes in Dapper Labs, and each gets a cut from both the initial retail and subsequent secondary market sales of the NFTs — the same arrangement the NBA and its union have with the company.

It was in early 2021 when NBA Top Shot got a tidal wave of media coverage, including at The Athletic, and consumers spent hundreds of millions of dollars buying the uniquely serialized digital highlights that are functionally electronic trading cards and use the same concept of artificial scarcity to fuel demand and prices.

Critics and the merely bemused (and amused) noted the same video clips are free elsewhere online, but that didn’t stop buyers — traditional collectors and those seeking to re-sell their NFTs for a big profit — from gobbling them up.

Dapper Labs and the NFL are hoping for a repeat performance, but the odds seem long because it’s been a bear market for NFTs through the middle of 2022 — suggesting the burst or contraction of an irrational financial bubble. Atop that, the wider cryptocurrency industry has stumbled, headlines grow about blockchain, crypto, and NFT swindles, and the wider economy has suffered inflation and rising energy prices until recently.

Is the power of the NFL enough to reignite the cooled sports NFT demand?

We’ll find out Friday when the first NFL All Day packs drop. They’re priced at $59 for a pack of four highlights, with the Holy Grail being a Tom Brady “legendary” highlight. Everyone who signs up gets a complimentary Patrick Mahomes NFT — he’s the face of a new marketing campaign for NFL All Day — that introduces the product to users.

Friday’s drop will be limited to 22,500 packs of highlights.

The NFL project has been in a closed beta testing phase since last year, with an estimated couple of hundred thousand participants buying and selling about 500,000 highlight packs for tens of millions of dollars, according to Dave Feldman, senior vice president of marketing for Dapper Labs.

The product was initially supposed to launch during last season’s playoffs, but all involved opted to wait until the start of the 2022 season so that all fanbases are still involved and any kinks could be worked out of the system. NBA Top Shot rolled out in a public beta in January 2021 and issues quickly cropped up with delays on how quickly customers could withdraw any resale profits.

The user interface is supposed to be simple to help customers avoid the complexity of many traditional crypto industry products and services. That helped the successful NBA Top Shot launch, albeit with complaints that users waited in long digital lines for limited releases of NFT packs.

“We really want to lean into simplicity,” Feldman said.

Other price points will be tested but nothing has yet been disclosed on how much other NFL products will cost.

Welcome to #NFLALLDAY ‼️

Own the best Moments, featuring exclusive digital video highlights from your favorite players & teams.

Our first public Pack Drop is Friday! Sign up and get a 🆓 limited edition NFL collectible, starring @PatrickMahomes. ➡️ https://t.co/sol88uYqUS pic.twitter.com/xJKu8SoZSC

— NFL ALL DAY (@NFLALLDAY) August 18, 2022

It feels today as if there are as many NFT products and projects as stars in the nighttime summer sky, meaning there is a lot of competition for Dapper Labs to try to surmount.

“We have a bit of an unfair advantage in that we’re partners with the NFL,” Feldman said. “I hope if there’s one brand that breaks through the noise, I hope it’s the NFL.”

As for criticism of the negative impact that energy-hogging blockchain technology has on the environment, Feldman said the Flow blockchain used to create its NFTs is one of the least harmful.

“Minting an NFT on Flow requires less energy than posting on Instagram,” he said. There is some analysis to back that up.

And the economics of the NFT ecosystem? A major criticism has been that early adopters hoover up the best NFTs and resell them at fantastic profits while late-comers trying to follow that model end up over-spending and suffering losses.

“That’s part of any microeconomy,” Feldman said, adding that the same occurs with trading cards, sneakers and other collectibles.

Both Dapper Labs and the NFL said that while speculation is part of the NFT environment, their focus is on traditional collectors as part of a business strategy to bolster fan engagement with the league, its players, and games.

“Our focus is in creating a really robust immersive companion experience for NFL fans that’s rooted in scarcity and high-level digital collectibles,” Feldman said.

The league echoed that sentiment: “That’s what it’s about, fan engagement. We’re not focused on the speculative,” said Joe Ruggiero, the NFL’s senior vice president of consumer products. “I look at it as coming back to the core engagement. Our job is to drive engagement for our fans. Speculation doesn’t fit into that. If we focused on speculation, we wouldn’t be driving engagement. Thinking about (consumer) segments in this space, the fan I’m interested in is engaged in this technology for the long-term.”

The sports industry has been under some fire for its eager adoption of cryptocurrency now that it’s collapsed, calling into question the ethics of teams and leagues promoting inherently risky financial products (much like past criticism for peddling gambling, booze, tobacco, etc.).

Dapper Labs said it has hired former NFL star wide receiver Chad Johnson to be the face of its forthcoming effort to educate users about NFTs and the platform, but that’s not expected to include highlighting the risks of speculation.

“Education is a core tenant of how we market this,” Feldman said.

NFL All Day also will have gamification aspects to appeal to traditional collectors, who may be encouraged to complete challenges like collecting a team’s starting lineup highlights. There also will be real-world physical rewards and perks to encourage collecting, such as trips to the Super Bowl and NFL Draft — an effort to add utility to the product.

“We’re continuing to work with Dapper on how to bring additional utility in the future,” Ruggiero said. “They can help unlock unique experiences.”

The NFL sees NFTs and related technology as tools to learn about fan behavior and how to assess their experience with the league — and how it can use the technology to grow its fanbase and, ultimately, profits.

“We’ve been bullish on where blockchain technology can go and have been exploring for some time,” Ruggiero said. “In the near-term, we’ve been testing and learning with companies at the forefront. Dapper’s got a great track record, what they’ve done with NFTs has been great.

“We want to continue to test and learn, understanding how we can engage fans using these emerging technologies,” Ruggiero continued. “Fans will increasingly utilize digital products and experiences in the future. We believe NFTs will be a meaningful part of that.”

Still, it’s hard not to see some variation of the NBA Top Shot phenomenon repeating, with a wave of buyers hoping to cash out for a tidy (or tidal wave) profit.

From Dapper’s perspective, the project clearly welcomes the speculation aspect, too, and the internal resale marketplace is aimed at both traditional collectors and investors seeking profits (the tension between which has long also been an aspect of the trading-card universe).

Artificial scarcity is the backbone of collectibles markets in general. Dapper Labs said it intends to have packs priced to appeal to the full spectrum of buyers, some of whom will be speculating for profit while others buy for the joy of traditional collecting.

“We must adhere to scarcity to appeal to speculators,” Feldman said. “We can meet the demands of any type of collector and speculator.”

What’s largely out of their control is the state of the market, where NFT sales and profits have fallen amid price declines (something fueled in part by cryptocurrency collapse, but also consumer fatigue along with inflation and gas prices hitting their wallets).

“It’s a fact that the market is experiencing a historical bearish period. Liquidity is down, prices are very largely impacted by the fall in value of cryptocurrencies, and let’s not even talk about the potential profit on resale,” reads a second-quarter analysis report from Nonfungible.com that tracks the NFT industry.

Global NFT sales volume fell by 20 percent from the first to second quarters of 2022, and the number of buyers and sellers declined by 25 percent and 36 percent, respectively, in that time.

Resale profit fell 45 percent, from $3.5 billion in Q1 to $1.8 billion.

“Most indicators are down in the second quarter of 2022, without much surprise given the global economic context. The main metrics are down about 25 percent, which is a relatively modest decline compared to cryptocurrency trends,” the report continued.

There are still hundreds of thousands of NFT sales per week, but overall they’ve declined since 2021’s mad rush. And traditional tangible baseball cards are also experiencing a market-wide price correction, too.

What’s unfolded with NBA Top Shot since its launch? It cooled off considerably after its unsustainable early peak. Today, it ranks seventh all-time among NFT collections by sales volume at $1.02 billion, per data from NFT tracker Cryptoslam.io. That’s via 21.4 million transactions by nearly 695,000 buyers, mostly in the secondary market.

NBA Top Shot’s sales peak was $45.7 million in transactions on Feb. 22, 2021. That month was the product’s peak with $224 million in retail and resale transactions. Things declined sharply after that. June and July 2022 sales were $7.7 million and $8.3 million, respectively, the first time monthly NBA Top Shot sales dropped under $10 million since December 2020, according to Cryptoslam data.

Some of that is cyclical, like with trading card sales that see peaks when a sport’s season begins or hits a major event like a draft or championship, and then sales ebb to some degree in the offseason. Sales also are driven by product-drop cadences.

The average NFT collectible sale price peaked at $1,075 in August 2021. Today, the average sale is $130, per Cryptoslam data.

The all-time NFT sales leader is the game Axie Infinity at $4.08 billion with 1.7 million buyers engaging in more than 17 million transactions. Second is Bored Ape Yacht Club — an NFT project popular with athletes and celebrities — at $2.37 billion by nearly 12,000 buyers. The average Bored Ape sale is $74,000 while the average NBA Top Shot sale is $48 today.

The NFL is aware that its NFT project is launching in an NFT downturn but said its interest in the technology is a long-term play.

“Because we are so focused on the long-term, the short-term volatility is something that is not really our focus,” Ruggiero said. “We understand there is a lot of uncertainty in that space so early on.”

The NFL has taken its time with NFTs, he said.

“We want to be thoughtful on how to proceed, engage and learn about technology, and protect the brand overall,” Ruggiero said.

The NFT project is part of the NFL’s interest in blockchain technology and its potential business applications, from fan perks and collectibles to potential uses in ticketing, video and other games, etc.

“In the more near-term, we’re being very thoughtful about how we’re looking at the space — a new space with a lot of things undefined, uncertainties,” Ruggiero said. “It could impact everything in the NFL ecosystem.”

(Photo: Courtesy of Dapper Labs)