All Top Shot Moments Are Now Non-Custodial — What That Means for YOU (and Flowty)
As of March 18, 2022, ALL Top Shot moments are officially non-custodial. This post will outline what Dapper Labs’ recent announcement means for you and why now is the perfect time to check out flowty.
Original post (March 18, 2022)
What is the tl;dr of the announcement?
For the first 15 months of NBA Top Shot’s life, there was no way for users to withdraw moments from the Top Shot platform to a third party wallet. In October 2021, Legendary tier assets were designated as non-custodial. This was a big step forward for Top Shot, but, realistically, many collectors do not have Legendary tier assets, so the impact was only felt by a small segment of users.
Today, Dapper Labs announced that Common, Fandom and Rare moments are joining the Legendary tier and transitioning to non-custodial, an exciting and important development for Top Shot collectors and the Flow ecosystem.
What does “non-custodial” actually mean?
When it comes to NFTs, non-custodial means that NFT owners have the freedom to withdraw NFTs from the Top Shot platform into a third party wallet and interact with marketplaces, lending protocols (like flowty) and more around the Flow ecosystem.
Instead of only being able to sell moments on the Top Shot platform, for example, users can now sell moments in third party marketplaces (like Bloctobay and VIV3). This opens up endless possibilities for Top Shot collectors and builders.
Builders can leverage blockchain and smart contract technology to design games, create liquidity solutions, offer auction / bidding systems for secondary transactions and more, for you and your Top Shot collection.
Today’s announcement is a huge win for the Flow community, and, as passionate collectors ourselves, we are excited to see what our fellow builders introduce to the ecosystem.
What is flowty?
Flowty is a peer-to-peer collateralized NFT lending marketplace supporting Flow Blockchain-based NFTs. Borrowers can secure loans using NFTs as collateral and lenders can generate passive income by identifying and funding loan listings in the flowty marketplace.
While we launched as a simple P2P lending marketplace, we are hard at work to add tools, services and features to the platform that will enhance the collector, creator and builder experience on Flow.
To learn more, we encourage you to review our Medium posts (FAQ and Flowty Primer are a great place to start). Please review our post on risks before using flowty for the first time.
Why would I borrow against my Top Shot assets?
We put together a post covering Use Cases for Borrowers, where we outline a number of situations in which collectors may find it valuable or worthwhile to borrow using Top Shot moments as collateral.
What else can I do on flowty?
In addition to providing utility and flexibility for Borrowers who need or want liquidity, flowty offers other ecosystem participants the opportunity to invest with a completely different risk-reward profile from simply buying and selling moments.
Lenders can fund a loan and either earn interest (if the Borrower repays) or receive collateral (if the Borrower does not repay before expiration). We recently posted an example of how the process works from the Lender perspective on our Twitter.
We are confident that ecosystem participants will find lending on flowty to be an exciting and interesting alternative to deploy capital in Top Shot and the greater Flow ecosystem.
Please see our post on Lender strategies to learn more about how you can approach the flowty marketplace as a Lender.
Why is now a good time to check out flowty?
Now that all Top Shot moments are non-custodial, accessibility and options for both Borrowers and Lenders are far greater. Legendary tier assets are scarce and valuable, meaning that:
Not many users have assets they can use as collateral (most users do not have Legendary moments)
Most listings on flowty to date have been north of $1k (average loan size of $5k on the platform across our first 80 loans) because of the value of Legendary moments. As a result, many Lenders who would be interested in lending a few hundred dollars or less have largely been priced out from participating. Today, that changes.
We are thrilled that today’s announcement means that more Borrowers and more Lenders can participate on flowty.
How is flowty celebrating Dapper’s announcement?
We are, of course, celebrating with contests and giveaways:
$250 Top Shot shopping spree via the giveaway channel in our Discord
Kicked off Round II of our half-court shooting competition in Discord
Summary
We are incredibly excited that flowty’s services and tools can now be utilized by the entire Top Shot community. Flowty has already served as a gateway to many people who had not previously interacted with third party platforms on Flow or transacted with Flow-based tokens (FLOW (coming soon), FUSD, USDT and USDC) and we cannot wait for a whole new segment of the Top Shot userbase to see and experience the flexibility and benefits that flowty brings to the community.
We have a ton in store and are eager and excited to push out more features and tools that further improve the Flow ecosystem.
Where to Find Us
Product Docs (FAQ, Step-by-Step Guides, etc)
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