How Rip Packs City Calculates Fair Market Value

What FMV Means Here

Fair Market Value (FMV) on RPC is our best estimate of what a moment would realistically transact for if listed at fair price today. It is not an appraisal, not investment advice, and not a guarantee of future sale price. We publish it to help you make better collecting decisions, not to set your expectations of what your moments are worth in dollar terms.

How We Compute It

Our FMV pipeline runs on NBA Top Shot, NFL All Day, Disney Pinnacle, LaLiga Golazos, UFC Strike and Candy MLB on a continuous cycle (Panini cards have their own engine, described below). For each unique edition, we look at three signal sources:

Recent sales (primary signal)

We pull every confirmed sale from the past 30 days, remove the prints that are not about the edition's typical value (a serial #1 or jersey-number sale carries a collector premium; a fat-finger or wash print is an outlier), and publish the median of the 7 most recent typical sales. A median follows a moving market within hours on an actively traded edition and is not moved by a single unusual print; we measured it against every realized sale each week and it beat the recency-weighted average we used before, which lagged a falling market. On a thinly traded edition we drop any of those sales that is more than 30 days older than its newest one (always keeping at least its 3 most recent), so a price is not anchored to a market that has since moved. With fewer than 7 typical sales we take the median of what there is, and where we can we show how many recent sales a price rests on.

Active asks (secondary signal)

We snapshot the lowest active listing price across NBA Top Shot's native marketplace and Flowty's secondary market. The lowest ask sets a soft ceiling — if no one will pay above this, FMV shouldn't either.

Distributional shape

For editions with enough sales (>10 in the past 30 days), we publish 10th, 50th, and 90th percentile prices alongside the single FMV number, so you can see the full distribution rather than just a midpoint.

When We Show a Price

• Priced from sales. Most prices come from recent sales, as described above. Where we can, the price is shown with the number of sales behind it (for example 7 sales / 30d) and when the edition last sold, so you can see how much market it rests on.
• Priced from a listing. When an edition has no sales to price from, its estimate is based on the lowest active ask, and it is marked from asks. That is what one seller is asking, not a completed sale — check recent sales before acting on it.
• No price. When we have too little data to price an edition, we withhold the price rather than guess.
• Editions that have stopped trading. When an edition has had no sale in 30 days and no live ask, its estimate is the median of its sales from the 90 days before its most recent sale (always at least its 3 most recent sales, at most 30). A price from a period when the edition traded higher is never carried forward past its latest market. A price that has not refreshed recently is left out of the dashboard’s headline portfolio total and noted separately.
• Price ranges. Where we show a 30-day price range beside a price (for example $4.00–$6.00 30d, the typical spread of real sales), that range is the better guide on an edition whose sales disagree.

Deal boards only surface deals on well-supported prices.

Panini cards are priced from their own sales on Panini’s marketplace, on the same principle — the latest sales of that card edition.

How Much of Our Pricing Rests on Sales

Our own gate for the whole platform is the share of priced editions whose current FMV is backed by enough recent sales — rather than by a listing alone or by too few prints. We publish it here, per collection, exactly as our monitoring computes it, because a reader deciding how much weight to give a price should see how much of the market it was priced from. A low figure is the honest state of a thin or closed market, not a number we tune.

Each figure is the share of editions, not of dollar value, over every edition that currently has a price in that collection, taken from the latest snapshot per edition. Disney Pinnacle (per pin) and Panini (per card edition) are each measured from their own price history, so their shares are on a different basis from the other collections and the figures are not averaged together. The “as of” time is when the figure was computed; a reading more than two days old is marked stale. When a figure cannot be read it says unavailable — we do not show a number we did not measure.

Estimated Value for Rarely-Traded Parallels

Some low-supply Top Shot parallels (a /10 Jukebox, say) go months without a sale, so their own FMV rests on a handful of old sales — sometimes all to the same collector. For those editions, when the full edition they are a parallel of still trades, we also show a separate Estimated value: the full edition’s FMV multiplied by the typical premium that parallel type carries over its full edition, and a likely range from the middle half of that premium.

• The premium is measured from real sales: each parallel’s monthly median price against its full edition’s median in the same month, over the last year, pooled by parallel type and tier.
• We only use a premium that held up when tested on editions it was not built from (typically within 1.5×) and that rests on at least 30 editions. Noisy combinations get no estimate at all, and neither do one-of-ones — a 1/1 is priced by who wants that card, not by a multiple of its full edition.
• An estimate is never above the lowest live ask, and it is always labelled with its basis. It is a guide, not a market price: it is not the FMV, and it is not used in portfolio values, deal boards or alerts.

What FMV Does NOT Account For

• Special serials. Jersey-match (#23 of LeBron), birthday matches, consecutive serials, or other serial-significance premiums are reflected via a separate serialMultiplier on each moment, not in the base edition FMV.
• Badges. Top Shot Score badges, official badges, and challenge rewards are separately tracked and may add value above edition-level FMV.
• Sentiment. A player getting traded or a viral moment of the week can spike prices in hours. FMV updates daily, so high-momentum events lag.
• Locked moments. A locked moment cannot be sold during its lock period; we do not discount FMV for this.

Limitations and Disclaimer

FMV is generated by automated software using publicly-available marketplace data. We make no warranty as to its accuracy. Prices in any digital collectibles market can move rapidly. Do not treat FMV as a basis for financial decisions of any consequence. If you are buying or selling, do your own research and consult an advisor for any meaningful transaction.

For technical questions about how FMV is computed, contact us through the in-app concierge.