More people are interested in owning and securing digital assets than ever before because they are self-sufficient. You don’t have to rely on a third-party to store and verify your assets the way you do with physical property. Digital assets on Web3 make it faster and easier for people to manage and verify the ownership rights of their digital assets themselves.
Digital sports collectibles have been increasingly popular to buy, sell, and trade online throughout the years. These collectibles are known as “Moments,” which are basically short video clips of noteworthy game moments.
However, the challenge has been to ensure the permanence of the digital collectible assets for their owners so that they don’t lose them in the years to come. The blockchain might provide the ledger of recorded ownership, but the media assets themselves still depend on the traditional servers’ centralized infrastructure to remain in existence. If something were to happen to these servers, neither collectors nor anyone else would be able to verify the ownership rights of digital assets.
NBA Top Shot Secures Permanence of Digital Basketball “Moments”
On June 4th, 2026, a major announcement from NBA Top Shot indicated that it would become the first licensed sports digital collectible platform to allow basketball fans to independently verify the ownership and authenticity of their digital collectible moments using public infrastructure. The announcement comes during the current heat and excitement of the NBA Finals.
The authentication comes from an open infrastructure that no single company controls or operates itself. That helps ensure that people’s ownership of their collectibles will remain intact forever.
Industry insiders are calling this a “CryptoPunks Moment” for sports collectibles, referring to the moment where digital asset ownership transitioned from a mere idea or promise to a permanent structural reality. NFT ownership was the first step in this direction back in 2017, and has since grown into the digital sports collectibles space. Now this latest announcement marks the first major step forward for the permanence and portability of digital ownership for sports collectible moments in the space.
What Does This New Change Look Like
NBA Top Shot is taking a bold and decisive step by moving its entire catalog of digital collectible assets to the decentralized peer-to-peer network known as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). It means that the videos, artwork, and metadata for these collectibles are no longer stored on centralized servers. Because of this, collectors can now permanently own their digital assets, which will remain accessible and independently verifiable.
Every digital collectible moment minted on NBA Top Shot, whether a piece of artwork or metadata information, will now be publicly and permanently preserved on the IPFS.
Collectors have always owned their digital collectible moments on the Flow blockchain network. Nothing is going to change here. The decentralized Flow network will continue to store the ownership records for collectors. The difference now is that those ownership records are independently verifiable. Without the use of centralized infrastructure, every digital collectible moment will be preserved on an open network and carry a unique cryptographic fingerprint that anyone can check and authenticate.
How It Works
IPFS offers what is called “content-addressed storage.” For example, the traditional digital asset framework requires users to search for a file’s location by entering its URL address. But if the server of that location goes offline, the file is lost forever.
The IPFS handles files differently by storing them across a distributed network of nodes to identify them by their content rather than their storage location. Every basketball video highlight, metadata, or piece of artwork is pinned to the decentralized network. That way, the same file produces the same address, such as a content hash or CID, so that anyone running an IPFS node can serve that file to anyone who requests it.
The IPFS Reference app is what links a user’s moment and preserved media together. Every NBA Top Shot play is mapped to its IPFS content, allowing users to search for any moment and retrieve its decentralized storage record. All you need is one node on the network to host the file, and it will be accessible. And since every IPFS file has a unique content hash, anyone trying to alter the content would cause the hash to change. Then, it would be immediately obvious that some tampering was going on.
For this reason, there is permanence in the ownership because the content is its own proof of authenticity. Anyone can use the IPFS Reference App to look up and verify any NBA Top Shot moment to retrieve its media content directly from the decentralized network. Once they do, they can confirm the content is genuine without requiring an intermediary for assistance.
Conclusion
All NBA Top Shot Moments will now have their media content anchored to IPFS, both new and old. Every time a new pack drops, the Moments inside them are permanent and verifiable from the very first moment you own them. The same architecture that powers on-network permanence for NBA Top Shot is being constructed to extend across everything else in the Dapper Labs space.
That sets a new standard for the future for sports collectors, and for the entire digital collectible market.
For more information, visit the NBA Top Shot blog.
