Presenting Dapper Labs
The serious business of fun and games on the blockchain
Since the day we created CryptoKitties, our goal has been to make it easier for everyone to experience the values of decentralization.
Today I’m very excited to welcome Venrock, Alphabet’s GV, Samsung NEXT, aXiomatic, the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund, and several more of the world’s leading players in crypto and entertainment to the CryptoKitties family to help us on this journey.
I’m equally excited to formally introduce our company: Dapper Labs.
We wanted a name that appropriately captured the ethos of blockchain (specifically the term for distributed applications, or dapps) and reflects our company values of being friendly, approachable, and trustworthy for newcomers.
The mission of Dapper Labs is ambitious: bring the benefits of decentralization to you, your friends, and the products you love.
We believe decentralization will benefit individuals more than any business.
At the same time, we also believe that the value has to be proven with use cases and applications that will take the world by storm. The path to mainstream adoption is driven by compelling and novel experiences, not financial speculation.
Bitcoin is the first clear example of this: a digital asset outside the control of any party held together by social consensus and the transparency of the technology.
Through new kinds of games, collectibles, and digital entertainment, you can share and explore the benefits of blockchain with friends, family, and fellow players you only meet on Twitch without the friction of ‘real life’ getting in the way.
Last year, 2.3 billion players spent $80 billion on virtual items they do not own. We have already demonstrated how blockchain technology gives players the ability to control the value they have paid for. Blockchain games are more like physical games where you buy the assets but can resell them to other players at any time — all on an open and transparent market.
If built right, blockchain games can be even more special.
We’re grateful for the attention we’ve received since we launched CryptoKitties last December, but remain mindful of the challenges it highlighted. Because of the speculative froth around crypto at the time, everyone just thought the game was about buying and flipping cats.
Now people are starting to realize what we launched with CryptoKitties is just the first step; the first ride in an open source and ever-expanding theme park of experiences.
Over a million CryptoKitties have been created – almost all by players like you. Mix and match your favorite genes to discover “mewtations,” find limited-edition “Fancy Cats” or Purrstige Kitties hidden throughout the genome, and design furever friends you can keep as mementos –– or sell on an open marketplace.
With CryptoKitties, we wanted to go a step further than just putting digital assets on the blockchain.
We are trying to answer a much larger question: can we use smart contracts to give those digital assets functionality? Can we, in a sense, bring digital assets to life?
Because we programmed everything you need to create a CryptoKitty into the blockchain — the rules of the game, the genetic code, and the recombination algorithm — we can continue building functionality on top without affecting the initial experience. Third-party developers can also build on our tokens without asking permission, which gives our users more choice in the experiences they can take their Kitties into.
In other words, anyone can build a ride for the CryptoKitties theme park and invite our community to play.
Progress thus far has been incredibly exciting, despite the challenges of working with new technology: aside from cryptocurrency exchanges, CryptoKitties has the most used set of smart contracts on the blockchain, with over 3.6-million transactions recorded to date, representing tens of millions of dollars exchanged on the marketplace. In the last week alone, over 1,100 players exchanged $130k worth of Kitties and performed 50k transactions — multiples more than the second most popular blockchain game.
We also have the most creative and vibrant developer community in blockchain gaming: over 50 teams are building a variety of experiences specifically for CryptoKitties, from hats-for-your-cats to racing, fighting, and collectible card games. We recently announced updated Terms of Service making clear third party developers can use original CryptoKitties artwork as long as they verify ownership on the blockchain.
To date, Dapper Labs has raised $27.85 million in funding.
With this financing, we are doubling down on building the most incredible team in blockchain — and accelerating an ambitious set of mandates:
- Expand the CryptoKitties universe — by building first-party experiences that let people engage with Kitties without having to learn the intricacies of the breeding game, and supercharging that by investing in a fervent community of hackers, gamers, and artists creating derivative experiences.
- Accelerate the development of infrastructure and tools to help onboard more players into the ecosystem as a whole — using blockchain games is incredibly high friction, and creating content for the blockchain is still quite difficult. We want to support and enable the growing community of artists, game developers, and infrastructure builders to work in tandem toward the future we all want: billions of daily active users interacting peer to peer!
- Partner with the world’s most compelling entertainment IPs to bring new communities of passionate fans to the blockchain.
We have an amazing group of mavericks on our team to help make sure we’re successful — three former startup CEOs, four former CTOs, and leaders from companies like Disney, Ubisoft, CCP, Zynga, Hasbro, EA, Sony, and Unity. Our focus will be on pushing the boundaries of blockchain gaming and building a sustainable foundation: healthy communities and balanced economies, driven by long-term perspectives.
The good news is the benefits of decentralization in gaming, while still new and unfamiliar, are downright obvious compared to other verticals.
Blockchain gives players and collectors:
- Freedom to do as they please with things they’ve paid for — sell, trade, give away, destroy, or HODL. Try doing that with your favorite mobile game — or on Fortnite.
- Access to a completely open, transparent, peer-to-peer marketplace so they know they’re getting the best price whether they’re buying or selling.
- Respect from knowing the rules of the experience are being applied equally and transparently to all — and that certain commitments, like the maximum cap of 50,000 Gen0s — are hardcoded into the game from the start.
- Choice to use our apps — or those developed by our amazing community. This includes new games and experiences on top of CryptoKitties as well as alternative interfaces into the breeding game itself. We recently published a guide to finding Purrstige traits which shows how power players use third party tools.
Don’t get us wrong, the barriers to make blockchain friendly, secure, and fun, are still daunting: the infrastructure is still nascent, and cost, speed, scalability AND user experience need to evolve dramatically before mainstream users will consider changing their daily habits.
But if you look to the future, you can see there’s something exciting happening here.
For the first time, blockchain allows for a world where digital assets, as well as online services, can be as permanent and immutable as the physical infrastructure we rely on every day. This will catalyze the transition to true digital freedom, where control of ownership, self-expression, and identity can be back where it belongs: in your hands.
