NBA Top Shot Announced Strict Marketplace Limitations As They Struggle To Handle Massive Traffic Demands

Over the past few months, NBA Top Shot has exploded in popularity, as hundreds of thousands of people flood the site every time there is a new pack drop. That growth is both exciting and a bit concerning for Top Shot, as they have struggled to keep up with their sudden growth as they are still a product in beta that is working out a lot of kinks and issues in real time. Doing that when hundreds of thousands of accounts are trying to get a pack means that the issues will be magnified and the frustrations will grow.

After the Rising Stars pack drop over the weekend, the Top Shot Marketplace has been down as they try to figure out how to handle the demands they’re suddenly faced with. The volume of items being bought and sold has stretched Top Shot’s infrastructure to the brink, and as they look to expand it to meet the demand, they announced a number of new limitations they’ll be placing on the Marketplace to ease the pressure on their system as they gradually reopen.

Collectors will be limited to buying one Moment every two hours under the new rules. They can attempt to buy as many as they’d like, but once they purchase one successfully, they will be locked out of buying any more for two more hours. Collectors will also only be allowed to create a new “for sale” listing for one Moment every two hours, which is meant to ease the burden on their servers. Finally, collectors will only be allowed to delist a Moment every 10 minutes once sales are open — for now the Marketplace has been opened to allow for unlimited delisting before sales go back live. They also won’t allow any new accounts to be opened and gifting will be turned off for an unspecified amount of time.

All of this is to say, the frantic pace of Top Shot buying and selling will slow significantly once they reopen the Marketplace. Dapper Labs said on Monday the limitations will eventually be loosened, but do not provide a timetable for that beyond saying they “expect to scale down these limits over time as we improve our infrastructure.” The stated reasons for the changes are to allow them to continue to combat bots, while also hopefully allowing them to stay open for longer. It also stands to reason that these limitations, while eventually loosened, might stay to some degree as they have been clear they do not want to be seen as an investment tool and are simply for collecting, and limiting the frenetic trading that can occur would certainly be one way to combat that.