tomwagmi's Collector Thesis — 2026

How I got here

Digital collectibles changed for me during the NFT boom of 2021. There was plenty of noise in that era, but NBA Top Shot felt different. The licensing mattered. The NBA, the NBA Players Association, and later the WNBA gave the product legitimacy that most digital projects simply didn’t have. I wasn’t buying an imitation of a collectible or something borrowing someone else’s intellectual property. I was collecting officially licensed moments from leagues and players I already followed. And the technology solved some familiar problems. No bent corners. No damaged sleeves. No grading company deciding whether something was a 9 or a 10. Ownership, authenticity, edition size, and transaction history could all be verified. That was the moment I began to believe digital collecting wasn’t simply a product of the NFT boom. It might actually be another evolution of collecting itself.

Core belief

Digital ownership is real ownership when authenticity, scarcity, and provenance can be independently verified. Blockchain technology doesn’t eliminate counterfeits, bad actors, or questionable projects. What it can do is establish a transparent record of what was created, how many exist, and who owns them. But technology alone doesn’t make something worth collecting. The collectible still needs meaning. For me, that comes from the same places it always has, which is the player, the moment, the story, the scarcity, and the connection a collector has to it. The world continues to move toward digital experiences. I don’t see any reason collecting should be exempt. It's something that everything is going to. Everything is going digital. So why not collectibles?

Highest-conviction platform

NBA TopShot remains the digital collecting platform I have the most conviction in. It was one of the originals to reach a mainstream sports audience, it has survived the extraordinary rise and correction of the NFT market, and it has accumulated something that can’t be manufactured overnight...history. The addition of the WNBA made the platform more interesting to me. It expanded the universe of players, teams, moments, and stories available to collect. I don’t assume Top Shot, or today’s version of any digital platform, will look the same five or ten years from now. The technology will change. Platforms will consolidate. But I believe the concepts being proven today, like digital ownership, verifiable scarcity, provenance, licensed intellectual property, and portable collections, will survive the platforms that introduced them. Whether today’s leaders ultimately remain independent or become part of something larger, I think they are helping build the foundation for what comes next.

Allocation logic

I don’t really think of my collection as an allocation. I collect what I want to collect. I look for rarity and scarcity, and I strongly prefer officially licensed collectibles. But I stopped chasing the market a long time ago. I’m far more interested in owning something I genuinely enjoy than trying to predict what everyone else will want next. My logic is simple: if something is meaningful enough that I want it in my collection, there’s a reasonable chance another collector will someday see what I saw in it. That doesn’t make every collectible an investment. It makes it collectible.

The tension I hold

The strongest argument against digital collectibles is also the most obvious: you can’t physically hold them. And despite all the language surrounding blockchain and digital ownership, there is still platform risk. Companies fail. Servers go offline. Technology changes. Accounts can be compromised. A collector can technically “own” an asset while still depending on an ecosystem to make that ownership useful. I don’t dismiss that concern. I think it’s one of the most important questions digital collecting still has to solve. But collecting has never been entirely without risk. Physical collectibles can be lost, stolen, damaged, counterfeited, or destroyed. Digital collectibles simply introduce a different set of risks. So I don’t collect blindly. I accept the tradeoff. If I believe in the product, understand what I’m buying, and enjoy owning it, I’m comfortable taking that risk. Because ultimately, collecting is supposed to be enjoyable.

Theory of value

My theory of value begins with scarcity. A digital collectible can gain or lose value based on the player, performance, rarity, edition size, utility, community, cultural significance, platform health, and stability of the underlying licenses. Those variables are constantly moving. But scarcity carries particular weight for me. If only a small number of collectors can own a particular Moment, that doesn’t automatically make it valuable. Scarcity without demand means very little. But when something desirable is also genuinely scarce, the equation changes. That’s why I’m drawn to low serial numbers, rare editions, historically significant Moments, and collectibles with stories attached to them. I want things that would be difficult to replace if I sold them. I don’t know whether that qualifies as a durable investment theory. I’m not sure it needs to. I collect what I love. And when the day comes that I’m ready to let something go, I hope there’s another collector who sees the same thing in it that I did.

What I'm building

I think digital collecting ten years from now will probably be a lot more boring. And I mean that as a compliment. The 2021 era was defined by hype, speculation, overnight communities, enormous price swings, and people racing to buy technology they barely understood because they were afraid of being late. That isn’t sustainable. I think the future looks quieter and more mature. Better products. Better interfaces. More reasonable prices. Less emphasis on flipping and more emphasis on collecting. Eventually, people may stop talking so much about the technology underneath a digital collectible. They’ll simply know what they own, why it’s authentic, how scarce it is, and why they wanted it. That’s when digital collecting becomes interesting to me, not when everyone is talking about blockchain, but when nobody has to.

Physical vs. digital stance

Balanced — I hold both with equal intentionality

I don’t see physical and digital collecting as competitors. They’re complementary. Some things are simply cooler in physical form. There’s something irreplaceable about holding a card, displaying an object, or owning a piece of memorabilia connected to a player or event. But digital collecting has advantages of its own, particularly when you’re collecting across large leagues and enormous catalogs. Digital collectibles can make ownership, organization, scarcity, provenance, and display remarkably simple. The format matters less to me than the collectible. If the player, moment, story, and scarcity are compelling, I’m interested whether I can hold it in my hand or open it on a screen.