Up Next: Dapper Labs

Dapper is building blockchain products for the people.

Beginning

Dapper Labs is a blockchain company building interesting products (known as Dapps or Decentralized applications) working with brands like the NBA and UFC. Their biggest Dapp is the NBA Top Shot, a digital trading card game where people can buy packs of “moments”, which aren’t anything like your weird uncle’s old Topps trading cards. Moments don’t just include players, but they can be highlights from a game or specific stat lines from a pivotal game. People can buy, sell, trade, and showcase their moments, with special packs releasing for events like all-star weekend and the playoffs. Dapper Labs helps solve the problem of authenticity and ‘minting’ for normal trading cards. Nowadays, for a valuable trading card, you need to encase it in a laminate and get it verified by some random guy, Dapper is solving this using blockchain technology. Also, the most interesting thing about this is that since all transactions are ‘tracked’ and open to the public, Dapper is able to set aside a pre-determined portion of each sale of a moment (even in a second-hand market) and redistribute it to the NBA and their players. This makes it very compelling for NBA players to engage with their fans and have their incentives aligned for a shared experience!

Middle

Dapper Labs was spun out of a Candian-based and Webkinz-like platform, called CryptoKitties founded by Stanford alumni Roham Gharegozlou. Roham graduated with a degree in Economics as well as a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Biological Sciences: not something you’d expect out of a tech-millionaire. After his dig with CryptoKitties and the creation of the Flow blockchain, Roham and Dapper Labs went on to build multiple other games and NFT trading platforms. After their great success with the NBA, Dapper Labs just announced a partnership with the UFC to give fans and NFT traders alike the opportunity to own a part of professional MMA.

Very recently, Dapper Labs also announced an incredible $305MM Series B round with VC legends like Andreesen Horowitz and a long line of superstar NBA players such as Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Michael Jordan. What was most interesting about this funding round, was the long list of NFL players with big names like Tyrod Taylor, Rodney McLeod, Stefon Diggs, and Trent Williams. With Dapper Lab’s past success with the NBA and a secure partnership with the UFC, don’t be surprised if the NFL and your favorite sports league get tacked on to their list of professional sports partners.

As crazy as their success is, Dapper Labs didn’t start working with these big brands to start with. The company started off with “CryptoKitties”, an app where you can start with a simple ‘kitty’ and breed with other kitties to create other cool and unique kitties. Think of it like a zoomer version of Pokemon, using blockchain. Dapper Labs has been using their own blockchain called ‘flow’ to build these applications, and leverage a technology known as Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs. This basically just means that none of these kitties or NBA moments are the same, they all are unique with their own serial number so some can be more valuable than others, unlike a normal cryptocurrency.

End

Despite Dapper Labs being valued at nearly $7.5B, we think Dapper Labs is slept on as a crypto company and product. Dapper is one of a few companies trying to bring crypto to the masses, where most other crypto companies are honed in on DeFi (like in my last piece) or the protocol itself. Dapper Labs is also doing something interesting and different from other tech companies. They are creating several different products for other brands, rather than scaling up one product entirely. You could argue their main product is their blockchain, Flow, but they get a bit more hands-on than that and work with top-name brands. Even though they’ve gotten this far with products like CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot, we think they’ve got a long road ahead.

Are they the next big crypto company? We’re not sure, but we think they are doing some really cool work and you have to be watching their every next move.

We are both broke, but we’d invest $6.75 of the 10 dollars in our bank account.