A Guide to Purpose-Built Blockchains

As blockchains exploded in adoption and use cases over the last decade, the number of challenges blockchains face has increased to meet the divergent and growing applications of the technology across various industries.

As cryptocurrencies and token offerings expand to more use cases and specific functions, their underlying infrastructure must specialize in creating a better developer and user experience. Programmatically different blockchains are being deployed for specific use cases, such as shipping, supply chains, financial infrastructure, and NFTs. 

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the original “catch-all” general-purpose blockchains; their purpose is to be the public blockchain network for all types of activity for all network participants. However, as adoption and usage have soared, catering to the network activity for the masses hasn’t been without problems.

While blockchain thus far has been most famous for its role in the rise of digital currencies, there is plenty of non-cryptocurrency uses for the technology. Purpose-built blockchains may make trade-offs with the core blockchain trilemma factors of centralization, security, and scalability to meet different industries’ needs with greater efficiency.

Challenges with Catch-All Blockchains

Most of the major public blockchains, like Ethereum, tend to face immense challenges with filling niche needs.

The first significant challenge in question is that of speed and throughput. Compared to Visa’s 65,000 transaction per second (tps) throughput, Bitcoin can only process 7 transactions per second, while Ethereum can do about 15-25 tps. Both are more decentralized than Visa, and permissionless, but specific use-cases might not need these advantages. 

Both the BTC and ETH networks have become busier than ever, especially with the NFT activity in 2021, and more adoption is on the horizon. As a result, the cost of sending a transaction has skyrocketed, regardless of what’s being sent. 

In Aug. 2021, Eth gas fees reached as high as $30 on average for a simple transaction, with smart contract transaction fees like for using dApps and NFTs being much higher, often in the range of $100-200 or more, which is a trend that had been increasing throughout 2021. 

“Catch-all” blockchains are like highways that don’t always differentiate the types of traffic to the extent that niche purpose blockchains can. Blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum are too slow and too expensive for the vast majority of smaller-scale, everyday transactions. 

Ethereum’s architecture isn’t customizable, but it does allow for a large array of different use cases including data recording data, supply chain management, insurance, tokenization of assets, and more. Moreover, Bitcoin and Ethereum were built with the principles of pseudonymity, censorship resistance, and transparency in mind.

This poses issues for some industries. For example, legacy regulated capital markets and financial services often have regulatory needs for identity, compliance, confidentiality, governance, and settlement, which aren’t fulfilled by Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s functionality. 

What are Purpose-Built Blockchains?

These issues have led to blockchain projects building distributed ledgers that target specific use cases. 

Blockchains are diversifying to become more specialized to specific tasks and. For example, they can enable higher throughput activities, faster settlement time, and less fees. These three features can make supply chains more efficient, help move and store different types of information, or capture a higher volume of transactions than major public blockchains today. 

Specific purpose blockchains can be built solely around the efficient and cost-effective exchange of tokens, execution of smart contracts, or other enterprise functions.

With purpose-built blockchains, large-scale complex applications can solve their unique problems without compromising or bending to problems inherited by catch-all blockchain architecture.

Examples of Purpose-Built Blockchains

Acala is a DeFi-focused blockchain that builds a set of financial primitives including the ACA stablecoin, a DEX with unified liquidity provisioning, and staking derivatives. Acala aims to become a parachain on the Polkadot network and is fully EVM-compatible, meaning Ethereum developers can migrate their smart contracts without significant changes to the code. 

Acala is essentially a niche blockchain optimized for use case of DeFi, created with the goal of reducing public network congestion and creating a more efficient and robust ecosystem.

Solana is a high-performance public base-layer blockchain created to track historical events (using proof-of-history) and transactions in a specific sequence, optimizing scalability over decentralization, and enabling scalable apps for developers and users, with low transaction fees and high throughput.

Algorand created a highly scalable, low fee network, decentralized digital currency, and smart contract platform specifically for the financial services industry to use. 

Flow is dedicated to serving NFTs at a much more efficient scale than Ethereum.

Enterprise blockchains can be used to streamline business processes at scale and serve the needs of corporations in a permissioned and centralized manner. For the corporate use case, ledger data visibility can be restricted to a select group of people. 

A nation-state creating and using its own blockchain for central bank digital currencies is another example of a purpose-built blockchain with different parameters of centralization, security, and visibility of transactions.

Ant Group launched AntChain, its own in-house productivity blockchain platform, that it claims offers an “all-in-one workstation that reduces the deployment time of the company’s blockchain-based solutions by as much as 90 percent.” Today, AntChain handles over 100M digital assets on its blockchains daily, and affiliate AliPay handles 1B transactions per day.

Final Thoughts: 

Blockchain technology is expected to expand global GDP by nearly $1.8 trillion in the next decade. The technology of purpose-built blockchains can be used for specific and optimized use cases to serve large-scale and complex applications while meeting both the growing needs of enterprise and consumers. 

Without any updates to the core networks, catch-all blockchains would continue to experience immense challenges if they were used for every niche need: think more cars and trucks funneling into a bustling highway. 

Purpose-built blockchains solve for speed, throughput, and other architectural limitations to meet the global needs of varied industries, spanning public, private, and enterprise needs. 

NBA Top Shot: A Complete Guide to Basketball on Blockchain

NBA Top Shot is the hottest talk on the cryptocurrency of 2021 so far; the collectible, blockchain-based NFT release platform and marketplace enable users to purchase NFTs of NBA highlight reels, and some of them have sold for over $200,000.

It seems like basketball on the blockchain is a slam dunk. Let’s explore. 

NBA Top Shot History: A Dapper Labs Project

NBA Top Shot was launched in July 2019 by Dapper Labs, a blockchain startup specializing in digital collectibles.

Prior to Top Shot, Dapper Labs’ best-known project was the viral CryptoKitties– a staple of 2017 cryptocurrency culture. CryptoKitties is an NFT-based game where users can collect and “breed” collectible cats. 

NBA Top Shot’s Home Page

While NBA Top Shot and Cryptokitties share many similarities due to their non-fungible nature, CryptoKitties is unique in that each CryptoKitty is one-of-a-kind in its design. In contrast, NBA Top Shot sells thousands of copies of an individual moment, although each is marked by a unique-serial number. 

CryptoKitties were frequently being bought and sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars during the 2017/2018 bull run in secondary marketplaces. 

The Dapper Labs partnership team has been incredibly busy since CryptoKitties, forming partnerships with the NBA and NBPA, Warner Music Group, Ubisoft, and the UFC. 

“Dapper Labs’ innovation and expertise make them a perfect partner to introduce this groundbreaking game and what we believe will become coveted digital collectibles for basketball fans around the world,” said Adrienne O’Keeffe, NBA Senior Director, Consumer Products & Gaming Partnerships in a press release regarding the 2019 NBA partnership. 

Dapper Labs raised $52.5M from notable funds such as Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Venrock, GV (formally known as Google Ventures), and Samsung as well as the founders of AngelList, Reddit, Dreamworks, Coinbase, and  Zynga. The team recently announced it is raising $250 million in a Coatue Management-led round in 2021. 

Contrary to popular belief, Dapper Labs doesn’t use the Ethereum blockchain; it uses the Flow blockchain, citing Ethereum’s inability to cost-effectively scale as too significant an obstacle for the trading of digital collectibles. With Ethereum gas fees spiking as high as $150+, Dapper seems to have made a great decision before reaching a critical mass of users and virality.  

How Does NBA Top Shot Work?

NBA Top Shot is designed to emulate the exciting experience of buying packs of trading cards. 

  1. You can create an account at https://www.nbatopshot.com/
  2. You will be required to fill out some basic KYC profile information. You will also be asked to make a Dapper Labs profile, which facilitates the transaction process. 
  3. You will be given the option to select your favorite teams, which will help NBA Top Shot curate your home-page experience. 

Once you’ve created your account, you’ll likely need to wait for a new pack to drop. We recommend signing up for their email list to be notified as to when the packs will go live. 

They sell out very quickly, and showing up on time doesn’t guarantee you’ll get to purchase a pack. 

So far, it seems there are three standard types of pack available:

  • Base Set (Common): For $9, you will get nine common moments. Every moment has a production of 1000+ with no maximum cap. 
  • Premium: For $24, users will receive seven common moments, and one rare moment. The rare moments have a production max of 999 clips. 
  • Legendary: $230 gets you six common moments, three rare moments, and one legendary moment. The legendary moment has a production max of 99 clips. 

There are also pack drops outside of the standard pricing. For example, on March 6th, 2021, “Seeing Stars” packs dropped for $14. 

How Much are NBA Top Shot Moments Selling For?

Taking a gander at the NBA Top Shot Marketplace, you’ll see thousands of Moments being sold for anywhere from $5 to $250,000+. 

One user made waves by purchasing a LeBron James Lakers Highlight Moment for $208,000, citing that he is an enormous fan of James and believes the moment is worth $1,000,000+. 

Sold out packs on NBA Top Shot

There are over 8 NFT moments of James that sold between $48,500 to $100,000. Zion Williamson’s “Holo MMXX” Block Moment sold for $100,000. 

Final Thoughts

Are NBA Top Shot moments worth hundreds of thousands, or potentially millions, of dollars? Is it just a fad that will fizzle out once the hype dies down? 

We’ll let history decide, but for now, it’s worth exploring two antagonizing lines of thought:

  • “NBA Top Shot moments are pieces of sports history! You’ve seen trading cards sell for millions of dollars, this is just like that but maybe even better. Since these moments are NFTs, you can easily track ownership, propriety, and you can transact seamlessly with anyone all over the world. They’re digital, so you don’t have to worry about storing them or experiencing a situation like your mom throwing out your lucrative Pokemon card collection!” 

Well, yes. One can argue that value is determined by how much anyone is willing to pay for a specific item. It is difficult to gauge how well value is preserved in a purely digital ecosystem because it is so new. Speculating with NFTs is very risky, and every ounce of prudence may help in the long-run. 

  • “People are crazy to spend any amount of money on NBA Top Shot Moments. You can just save the video to your computer and watch the moment whenever you want, for free! The marketplace is highly speculative and the true value of NBA Top Shot Moments is probably much less than what people are trying to sell them for.” 

Well, yes. You can also buy a mock imitation of the Mona Lisa for about $100. Heck, the paint on it probably won’t even be chipping. The value of NBA Top Shot Moments and NFTs is in their scarcity and ownership features

In theory, more people watching and saving a particular moment will only increase the value of owning the original– it’s basically free advertising. 

Time will tell how far basketball on the blockchain will go, but it’s worth paying attention to for any sports fan or collector.