Buyer count tells you how many people showed up. Retention tells you whether they came back. Over the past few weeks, I’ve looked at supply, active buyers, and how much marketplace activity depends on a relatively small group of collectors. This time, I followed the buyers. For @NBATopShot and @PaniniAmerica, I tracked buyers active during selected weeks and looked for another secondary-market purchase 7–30 days later. OVERALL RETURN RATES Top Shot: 78–82% Panini: 64–75% That makes Top Shot look meaningfully stickier. But those numbers include regulars who were already buying repeatedly. THE ONE-PURCHASE TEST So I narrowed it to buyers who made exactly ONE purchase during the starting week. June: Top Shot 52.0% | Panini 53.3%
July: Top Shot 65.4% | Panini 46.4%
August: Top Shot 54.2% | Panini 33.5% That was the interesting part. June was nearly identical. July and August were not. MY TAKEAWAY: Both platforms can bring their regulars back. Top Shot also did a better job bringing back the one-purchase group in July and August. June is why I wouldn’t call that a settled pattern yet. Among people who only showed up once that June week, roughly half made no qualifying return purchase within 30 days. An active marketplace can have strong repeat buying without necessarily turning occasional buyers into regulars. CANDY: AN EARLY LOOK @CandyDigital gives us an earlier look at the same question. By Friday around 1:10 p.m. ET, I counted 58 buyers in the tracked All-Star secondary feed. 49 had previously bought Base. So 84.5% of early All-Star secondary buyers were familiar Base buyers. But I had previously identified 261 Base buyers. Of those: • 49 bought All-Star on secondary • 22 more received an All-Star pack from Candy’s issuer wallet • 190—about 73%—had not yet appeared in either group Same data. Different perspective. Only about 27% of the earlier Base group had shown up in those two All-Star measures so far. WHAT I’M WATCHING: An All-Star release should give earlier Base buyers a reason to show up again. In the activity I could track by Friday, only 49 of 261 had bought All-Star on secondary. Another 22 received a pack directly from Candy’s issuer wallet. At the same time, 49 of the 58 early All-Star secondary buyers had already bought Base. That’s a lot of familiar buyers supplying the early activity, with relatively few of the earlier Base buyers visible on the other side. It’s early, and the primary-market picture is incomplete. But I want to see what Candy does next to draw more of that Base group back as the release continues. The Candy snapshot is too early and incomplete to compare directly with the 30-day Top Shot and Panini data. BUT THE QUESTION IS THE SAME: Your regular collectors are easy to spot. The harder question is how many occasional buyers find a reason to come back. I’m also launching The Digital Collectibles Prospectus on Substack as a home for the deeper version of this work. That’s where I’ll put the methodology, caveats, charts, and additional context that don’t fit cleanly into an X post. The previous deep dives are already there, and the full breakdown of this retention study is up now. Link in the first reply.