My Founder’s Story: How a $2,000 eBay Scam Led Me to Build Vaultopolis & TSHOT
This post is a guest post from a community developer, Libruary (@Libruary_NFT).
Before I ever owned a digital collectible, I was deep in the world of physical sports cards. From my home here in Toronto, my lifelong passion for basketball found an outlet in the world of collecting. I spent my time buying and selling cards on eBay, not as a grind or a side hustle, but simply for the love of the hobby.
But anyone who has operated in that physical world knows the risks. I learned that lesson the hard way. A $2,000 sale, a buyer who claimed the package never arrived, and a dispute lost. Even with delivery confirmation, PayPal and eBay sided with the buyer. I was out the cards and the money, with no recourse. The centralized system I relied on had failed me.
The $2,000 Lesson That Sparked a Revelation
It was that stinging frustration that led me to discover NBA Top Shot in August of 2020. For me, it was a revelation.
For anyone unfamiliar, NBA Top Shot is an officially licensed platform where you can collect video highlights of spectacular NBA plays. Think of them as digital sports cards for the modern age. Each “Moment,” as they’re called, is an NFT (Non-Fungible Token) on the Flow blockchain, which means your ownership is unique, verifiable, and secure.
Suddenly, the problems that plagued the physical world vanished. No more worrying about astronomical shipping costs from Canada, no more packages lost or damaged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and no more questions of authenticity. It was a frictionless, trustworthy system for collecting. It felt like the future, and I went all in.
From Collector to Community Builder
My conviction was so strong that in October 2020, I went to Blowout Forums — the heart of the sports card community — to start a thread titled “NBA Top Shot — High Risk, High Reward?” and see if others felt the same. As proof of my own belief, I shared my first purchase: a Series 1 LeBron James tribute dunk to Kobe, one of only a thousand, which I had bought for $36. The response to the thread was surreal. It exploded into one of the largest conversations on the forum with over 1.3 million views, proving the massive appetite for this new frontier — even if the very first reply was a GIF of a baby throwing money away, perfectly capturing the initial skepticism.
The next few years were a wild ride, with incredible ups and downs. Through it all, my conviction never wavered — to this day, I believe NBA Top Shot is the highest-quality digital collectible project ever created. My passion for it took me to real-life community events from San Francisco to my hometown of Toronto. I watched the platform evolve with WNBA Moments and a great mobile app, and I kept collecting the entire time, chasing key rookie debuts like Victor Wembanyama’s and Caitlin Clark’s.
But as a builder, I also noticed something was missing. For all of Top Shot’s quality, we never saw a robust ecosystem of developers building on top of the platform to give our Moments new utility. That’s when I realized the fundamental friction wasn’t in the collecting itself, but in what we could do with our collections next.
A New Problem: The Friction of a Digital Collection
As I continued to build my digital collection in the months that followed, I ran into a new kind of friction — one that wasn’t about market prices, but about the platform’s own mechanics. Managing a large portfolio of Moments became a chore. The only tool available was the traditional marketplace, which required listing each asset manually, one by one. It was slow, inefficient, and simply not built for active collectors.
This frustration brought back memories of my physical collecting days. I remembered literally throwing away base cards of non-star players. They had a theoretical “book value,” but in reality, the friction of listing, selling, and shipping them individually made them worthless. They were illiquid trash.
I realized the same problem was happening in the digital world, but with a key difference. While every Moment is technically unique, the market treats thousands of common, high-serial-number Moments as interchangeable, all holding the same “floor price.” NFTs were repeating the inefficiencies of cardboard, but because they are digital, I knew this was a solvable problem.
This realization became my focus. My professional background is in software quality assurance and cybersecurity, specifically within the financial sector. It’s the kind of work where, if you do your job well, no one ever sees it because the bad things never happen. I realized that this unique combination of experience — deeply understanding security and trust from my professional life, the physical card hobby, and the new world of Top Shot — gave me a rare perspective. It felt like a challenge I was uniquely positioned to solve.
That conviction is why I dedicated myself to creating Vaultopolis, and its flagship token, TSHOT.
Unlocking Our Collections, Together
At its core, Vaultopolis is a platform built to solve this problem, and TSHOT is the engine that powers the solution.
TSHOT is the engine for this new liquidity. It’s a fungible token on the Flow blockchain, always backed 1-for-1 by the real NBA Top Shot Moments secured in the Vaultopolis treasury. This creates a simple and powerful loop: collectors can deposit any Moment to instantly mint TSHOT, and later redeem that TSHOT to receive a random Moment back from the vault.
The process is simple and built for the community:
- Deposit & Mint: Connect your Dapper Wallet, select the Moments you want to tokenize, and mint TSHOT in a single transaction.
- Redeem & Hunt: At any time, you can burn your TSHOT to redeem random Moments from the vault. It’s like having a pack drop available 24/7 — a thrilling way to hunt for hidden gems.
Giving Your Moments Superpowers
The real magic happens once your value is unlocked. TSHOT allows you to do things that were simply impossible with your dormant Moments:
- Instant Bulk Trading: Instead of 100 separate listings, you can sell 100 TSHOT in a single swap on a DEX like Increment.fi or PunchSwap.
- Earn Passive Yield: Your collection can finally start working for you. You can pair TSHOT with FLOW in a liquidity pool to earn passive income from trading fees.
- New Ways to Play: I’ve partnered with platforms like aiSports FastBreak, allowing you to use TSHOT to enter wagering contests and compete for prizes.
Built on a Foundation of Trust
After my experience with eBay, building on a foundation of trust was non-negotiable.
- Secure & Audited: Vaultopolis is built on Flow’s secure blockchain, and the smart contracts undergo regular security audits to protect your assets.
- Provably Fair: Redemptions use Flow’s Verifiable Random Function (VRF), ensuring the selection of Moments is tamper-proof and fair for everyone.
Since going live on April 17, 2025, the response has been incredible. With over 5 million Moments exchanged and a vault holding over 143,000 Moments from more than 300 active users, it’s clear the community was ready for this.
The Road Ahead
My journey begins with the community I know and love, NBA Top Shot, but this is just the first step. I have a much bigger vision for Vaultopolis and am already hard at work on what comes next. Stay tuned as I continue to build new ways to unlock the full potential of digital ownership.
This platform was built by a collector, for collectors. I invite you to join us and take the next step in the evolution of digital ownership.
An Exciting Update
The journey since launching has already been incredibly rewarding, and I’m thrilled to share a recent milestone. This past Friday, Vaultopolis was selected to join the Founders Forge accelerator as part of the prestigious PL Genesis: Modular Worlds hackathon hosted by Protocol Labs.
Out of 1,904 participants and 357 submitted projects, our vision for a liquid future for digital collectibles was honored, and we were chosen as one of just 15 teams for this mentorship-driven program. This selection comes with a $10,000 grant to fuel our development. To top it all off, we were also awarded a $1,000 prize from our home ecosystem, Flow Blockchain.
This recognition is a powerful validation of the problem we’re solving. The work is just beginning, and we’re excited to build the future with the support of these leaders in the Web3 space.
Ready to get started?
- Have Moments? Instantly mint TSHOT with your collection on Vaultopolis.
- Have Crypto? Swap FLOW for TSHOT on a recommended DEX.
Thank you for being part of this journey.
— Libruary (@Libruary_NFT)
