Owning the Highlight, Forever: How NBA Top Shot is Moving Its Footage and Artwork Fully Onchain

For the first time in sports collectibles, every NBA Top Shot Moment – the video highlight, the artwork, the metadata, everything – will be stored on a decentralized network starting this season. 

This represents a paradigm shift in how digital collectibles are built, owned, and preserved.

Why This Matters

From the start, NBA Top Shot gave NBA fanstrue ownership of moments from the games, only on Flow.

Top Shot NFTs have always been permanent, but the video highlight and artwork behind it were hosted using a mix of onchain pointers and centralized infrastructure.

Big changes are coming later this season.

Coming in 2026, all of the Moments assets—video, thumbnails, metadata—will be stored directly on the network.

The result is a collectible so independent from any one entity that ownership is guaranteed to be permanent. With this advancement, collectors can unequivocally know that they truly own these Moments in perpetuity.

True Ownership, Verified on Flow

Creating a permanent, verifiable link between an NFT and its media is our purpose. The Dapper team accomplishes this by embedding a unique hash of the media into the NFT's smart contract and/or by leveraging the unique capabilities of Flow to store media directly on the blockchain. By making this link public and verifiable onchain, we empower any developer to integrate and display these collectibles, creating a truly open and accessible ecosystem - no centralized gatekeeper required.

Dapper is committed to radical transparency. Automated onchain checks will continuously verify media integrity, and we will provide open-source tools for anyone to run these checks themselves.

‍

The Roadmap

Following the completion of the Dapper team's proof of concept in the summer of 2025, they will begin migrating the entire collection of Moments to this permanent architecture starting in 2026. This foundational upgrade applies to every Moment ever created, ensuring a consistent standard of permanence for all collectors. From then on, any new Moment will do with onchain hashes from the point of being minted.

‍

A Call To Flow Developers

The NBA and Dapper Labs are making this migration fully transparent. The community is invited to:

• Inspect the Flow smart contracts once the new permanence standard goes live.
  
• Contribute to the open-source audit tools we will release for hash verification and retrieval testing.
  
• Build new experiences, such as marketplaces, showcases, tooling, analytics, etc.  directly from the public data.

This is how Web3 was meant to work: open, verifiable, and impossible to turn off.

Looking Ahead

This isn’t just an NBA milestone. This is a standard for all digital collectibles. It’s a blueprint for the entire sports and entertainment industry:

• Immutable Media – Your highlight is no longer confined to just a URL; it’s a cryptographically anchored file that can never be altered or revoked.
  
• Self-Sovereign Ownership – Anyone can build a marketplace or viewer from the onchain data alone.
  
• Future-Proof Value – Collectibles retain integrity regardless of the fate of any single company.

With this migration, NBA Top Shot sets the gold standard for sports digital collectibles, where every dunk, buzzer beater, and record-breaking highlight is not just unforgettable, but also un-erasable.

Welcome to the next era of fandom. The highlight is yours, permanently.