You can grasp everything big and small in the venture capital circle
Tencent Venture | ID：qqchuangye
"Dapper Labs became the darling of NFT investments."
The source of this article is "MetaverseHub of the Heart of the Metaverse", which is reproduced by Tencent Venture with permission.
Author/Metaverse Heart MetaverseHub
"Pioneers of the Metaverse" is a column we set up for the development of the Metaverse, mainly for those practitioners who dig deep into the metaverse industry or carry out "gold panning" in the metaverse, share the stories of these enterprises or entrepreneurs, and glimpse those enterprises or individuals that lead the development of the global metaverse from a unique perspective. Here's our 4th installment to see how Dapper Labs, which was named "The World's Most Innovative Company 2022" by Fast Company magazine, has grown into a global tech unicorn, followed by Enjoy.
According to the latest analyst data from overseas platform NonFungible.com, the total turnover of global NFTs in 2021 exceeded $18 billion, while the corresponding 2020 was only $82 million, that is to say, in the past year, the size of the NFT market has expanded by more than 200 times.
At the end of last year, the well-known media "Reuters" announced the 12 hot words in the 2021 technology circle, 12 words such as NFT and meta-universe, Web3, and fabs became the representatives of the technology circle in the past year, which also became the epitome of the hot growth of NFT in the past year.
Of course, when we think of NFTs, we may also think of American artists Beeple, NBA Top Shot, CryptoPunk and "Boring Apes", which reflect the rapid growth that NFTs have experienced in the past year, and among these representatives, the most surprising thing for us is the huge success of the commercialization of NBA Top Shot.
According to the beta version data of NBA Top Shot, the retention rate of users has reached 90%, and the economic income of fans has reached nearly 1 billion US dollars in a year since its launch, and it has more than 1.5 million users, of which 80% are mainstream users and have never been exposed to the blockchain before.
Because of this, the world's most innovative company in 2022 announced by the well-known cutting-edge business media "Fast Company" magazine, NBA Top Shot developer Dapper Labs became the only crypto company shortlisted, and ranked first among the most innovative game companies. At the same time, after completing last year's financing, its valuation reached $7.6 billion, becoming a well-deserved global unicorn.
So, what kind of company is Dapper Labs, why did it suddenly become the world's most innovative company, and why did you create such a representative collector's game as NBA Top Shot, and where did the team behind it come from?
1
The history of Dapper Labs
Founded in February 2018, Dapper Labs aims to educate 1 billion users about the benefits of blockchain and experience decentralization in a simpler and more fun way. In just a few years, it has created the world's first blockchain game CryptoKitties and the popular NBA Top Shot, and even opened up a new model for commercialization in the NFT field.
Counting the history of Dapper Labs along the way, each new project has set a new record. Similarly, Dapper Labs' achievements in the blockchain field are obvious to all, so the good story of "Dapper Labs produced by Dapper Labs must be a boutique" has also become popular in the circle, so how was Dapper Labs born?
Dapper Labs with the founders of those years
The Dapper Labs team is co-led by Roham Gharegozlou, Dieter Shirley, mikhael Naayem, who was born in Iran and has been exposed to the Internet since high school, producing websites, and in his 3rd year after graduating from Stanford University, in 2012, he founded a studio focused on mainstream applications and emerging technologies on new platforms called Axiom Zen.
The studio didn't start out in blockchain and crypto-related business, but in 2013 Roham Gharegozlou met Dieter Shirley, who had been the development director of Atimi Software and a senior software engineer at Apple, and who had read the Bitcoin white paper and was mining his first bitcoin from his family computer.
It was then that Roham Gharegozlou learned about the crypto industry and was drawn to the charm of blockchain, Axiom Zen gradually became involved in blockchain and artificial intelligence, and the studio won the grand prize at the 2014 Las Vegas Money 20/20 Hackathon.
Mikhael Naayem was a high school classmate of Roham Gharegozlou in Paris, and when Roham Gharegozlou approached Mikhael Naayem and told him about the world of blockchain, he had just sold his mobile game platform-as-a-service startup to Animoca Brands, and then Mikhael Naayem realized that the technology had the potential to give people ownership, rights and freedoms.
After several requests from Roham Gharegozlou, Mikhael Naayem traveled to Canada.
In 2017, Dieter Shirley proposed the ERC-721 token standard, and before that, CryptoPunks had also explored non-homogeneous tokens, but they only modified on the ERC 20 standard.
It can be said that the ERC-721 token standard has made a key contribution to the entire team, at the same time, the project based on the development of Ethereum, Crypto Cat, has caused congestion in the Ethereum network after going online, and the term "NFT" has also been officially proposed.
Crypto cat is on fire, but Dapper Labs' exploration in the field of encryption has not stopped, and the network congestion problem caused by crypto cat on Ethereum has exposed its shortcomings in scalability, and it has ushered in a cliff-like decline after the explosion. Based on the user's experience and the long-term development of the team, Roham Gharegozlou and his team decided to set up a new company and built their own public chain - Flow Network.
Dapper Labs' "open-hang" chain
With an excellent user experience and a fast, decentralized and eco-friendly blockchain, Flow Chain not only solves the problem of throughput and cost, but also solves the usability, so it is gradually entering the public's field of vision.
Dapper Labs created the Flow public chain with the intention of building it as a platform dedicated to high-performance Dapps and games, not only decentralized games, but also various forms of NFTs can develop their own ecology in the Flow ecosystem.
David Pakman, a partner at venture capital firm Venrock, once described Flow this way: Applications such as decentralized games and crypto collectibles place different scalability requirements on blockchains, and sharding simply cannot solve this problem. That's why Dapper Labs created Flow, hoping to expand the users of decentralized games to tens of millions.
It is also the Flow chain that has different characteristics from other public chains, and many investment companies and institutions see the potential of Flow in the blockchain field, so the high investment also provides a lot of support for the development of Flow.
At that time, Crypto Cat raised $12 million in the first venture capital round, and Dapper Labs was a new company founded after Crypto Cat left Axiom Zen, and has grown from the establishment of Dapper Labs to now complete 11 rounds of financing. We use a table to learn more about Dapper Labs' financing.
As you can see, Dapper Labs has a wealth of development experience and unquestionable capabilities, which is why it has received investment from a wide range of institutions covering the sports and entertainment worlds.
Although Dapper Labs has used time as a bet to build a new generation of blockchains, the rise of Dapper Labs can already be seen in its development in just a few years.
2
What popular products has Dapper Labs developed?
In December 2020, Roham Gharegozlou, founder and CEO of Dapper Labs, wrote a speech titled "Why Are the NBA, UFC, and Ubisoft Embracing Blockchain?" In his speech, he said that only fun things can promote the popularization of blockchain technology.
Gharegozlou believes that ease of use and scalability are an important foundation for the development of the blockchain ecosystem, and the audience of the ecosystem is also crucial.
Based on this, Dapper Labs has never stopped, and they have joined forces with many well-known institutions such as the NBA, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), Warner Music Group, the Spanish Football League, the National Football League, etc., to cooperate with listed game companies such as SUMO, Ubisoft and Animoca, and have developed a series of popular products.
When it comes to Dapper Labs' products, the most well-known is probably Cryptokitties. Cryptokitties is the world's first blockchain game and currently has over 130,000 users and 2.01 million Cryptokitties.
Cryptokitties once caused a sharp rise in Ethereum Gas fees, and also strengthened Gharegozlou's determination to build a new blockchain.
In May 2019, Dapper Labs launched Ethereum-based game CheezeWizards, creating the first battle royale type of blockchain game, pioneering a new style of chain game.
In October 2020, Dapper Labs' blockchain Flow, which has been building since 2018, was officially launched. With over 1,000 projects in the pipeline, FlowChain is a fast, decentralized, and developer-friendly blockchain.
At the same time as the launch of the Flow chain, Dapper Labs also launched a public beta version of the NBA Top Shot, which triggered the enthusiasm of the whole network for NFTs. Fans can collect and take ownership of the wonderful moments of NBA superstars, fulfilling the long-cherished wishes of NBA loyal fans for many years. At present, the total transaction volume of NBA Top Shot has exceeded $1 billion, and the total sales volume has exceeded 11 million.
Dapper Labs then launched its decentralized application, Dapper Wallets, dedicated to creating a trusted gateway to the digital world and supporting users to purchase and store digital assets, with a vision of providing everything needed for a successful build in the metaverse. Dapper Wallets currently has more than 2 million users and processes more than 20 million transactions.
In October 2021, Flow integrated filecoin storage services to realize the vision of NFTs becoming more decentralized, ensuring that NFTs for holders and publishers are "safe to use anywhere."
At the same time, Dapper Labs has also partnered with the National Football League (NFL) to launch the American football NFT market equivalent to the NBA Top Shot on Flow. NFL ALL DAY officially launched at the end of the Super Bowl in February 2022 and generated a total of $15 million in sales in a short period of time.
In the early days of the NFL ALL DAY, Dapper Labs partnered with the UFC to launch the UFC Strike based on Flow, which allows fans to build their own digital profiles to collect NFTs and interact with their favorite UFC athletes.
In addition, Dapper Labs and the Spanish Football League plan to launch an NFT platform that records iconic moments, which deserves our further attention and expectations.
However, The Pace of Dapper Labs has not stopped, dapper Labs has partnered with NFT startup Genies to launch the NFT platform The Warehouse, and has partnered with Dr. Seuss Enterprises collaborates to launch "Seussibles!" "NFT, the establishment of a virtual headquarters in the metaverse project Matrix World. The list goes on and on.
Many analysts have said, "Maybe Dapper Labs will become the Disney of Web3", the 21st century is a new era of creating IP, and maybe Dapper Labs will bring us more surprises.
3
Why is Dapper Labs out of the loop so often?
Why did DapperLabs go out of the loop so many times because of how many successful games he made? Created an advanced blockchain platform for the blockchain world? Or is it because some innovative business model has been explored? It can be said that these reasons are the main reasons, but it can also be said that they are not.
Because the real reason, and behind these reasons, is that the Dapper Labs team has been keeping the original intention and moving towards the goal of "how to make the blockchain better adopted by the mainstream".
Around this goal, we can better understand how Dapper Labs achieved its original intention from the three directions of users, developers, and innovative business models.
User experience
User experience is critical to the widespread adoption of blockchain technology. When Dapper Labs' crypto cat CryptoKitties was the first blockchain game to hit the industry, the honor it brought did not make them feel too proud, but felt many problems from this experience, such as Ethereum's own performance is very limited, and the transfer fee is very high.
For Dapper Labs, which wants to popularize blockchain technology to the mainstream population, the current Ethereum, and even the future upgraded Ethereum 2.0, is not the platform that Dapper Labs wants. After examining a number of emerging blockchain public chains, Dapper Labs still has not found a blockchain platform that matches their vision.
Therefore, in order to achieve a blockchain platform that can carry tens of millions of users, they independently launched a new high-performance public chain Flow Network.
In Dapper Labs' understanding, in order to achieve the popularity of blockchain, then there must be a platform that can support consumer-level applications, as well as applications that can support millions of users, and the experience of these applications should not be much worse than the existing Internet in terms of performance, and any operations inside should be as free or very low as possible, and users do not need to understand blockchain technology when using these applications.
At present, most of the blockchain applications are for people who are familiar with the basic operation of the blockchain, but such a group of people must be only a minority of the majority of the user group, and it is difficult to achieve the mainstream adoption of blockchain technology based on such a group.
Only when the blockchain application does not need to understand the blockchain technology, the operation is simple, and the cost is low, can it get the support of ordinary users who do not understand the blockchain, and this is the goal of the Flow public chain launched by Dapper Labs.
At present, there are already a number of blockchain applications on the Flow chain that are practicing this goal, and the NBA Top Shot is one of them, which quickly introduces the traditional NBA star card users in a very short period of time, and these users can play with the NBA Top Shot without understanding the blockchain, thus obtaining a user experience like the traditional Internet. This also allows the NBA Top Shot to quickly exceed 1 million users and more than $100 million in revenue.
Developer friendly
Developers have always been an important cornerstone of ecological development, and the Dapper Labs team, which is also the developer of blockchain ecological applications, understands the difficulties and needs of developers in the development process.
Therefore, when Dapper Labs designs the Flow public chain, on the one hand, it considers how to launch a higher-performance and easier-to-use blockchain platform to meet the user's usage requirements; on the other hand, it considers how developers can develop more easily during development to promote the birth of more blockchain use cases.
Flow chain adopts a new smart contract language Cadence, and subverts the current state of Smart Contract Programming for Ethereum, fundamentally introducing a new concept that shifts the account implementation from Ethereum's central ledger to Flow's distributed resource approach.
Compared to Ethereum's Solidity, Flow's Cadence's smart contracts are more decentralized, enhanced security, and support for advanced use cases such as resource nesting and composition.
In addition, the network design of the Flow chain is driven by results, with upgradable smart contracts that are convenient for developers to iteratively upgrade applications, and Flow can also support built-in logging to the Flow simulator for further adjustments.
A number of innovative technologies have made Flow fast and easy to develop in terms of development, which has been widely recognized by developers.
Thousands of developers are learning to use Flow's tools. Many universities are teaching students about Flow and the opportunities to do blockchain, as well as the various applications that can be built on it.
Even Ubisoft raved about The Flow chain, saying that Flow allows them to focus on the logic of the DApp. This is also why the ecology of the Flow chain is developing at a high speed and continues to launch explosive projects.
Model innovation
With a higher-performance platform and smart contract languages and features that are easier to develop, it seems that Dapper Labs is closer to their goal.
But these advantages can only be regarded as a good "instrument" in the "work to do good things must first be used", the real dapper Labs to soar, gradually approaching the goal of the factor, or Dapper Labs continue to explore new models.
And the success of each new model will inspire developers of other blockchain applications and lead the direction of the industry.
As early as 2017, Dapper Labs launched the ERC721 standard and the world's first blockchain game CryptoKitties, at a time when blockchain technology was only used for homogeneous tokens, Dapper Labs' series of innovations was like a nuclear bomb, shocking all participants in the entire industry.
Since then, the blockchain industry has opened the era of NFT, and now the leading chain game project Axie Infinity has many references to CryptoKitties.
However, CryptoKitties also made Dapper Labs realize that such a blockchain application threshold is very high, and it can only attract those who have blockchain basic cognition, which is difficult to get a wider application.
The mainstream adoption of blockchain must not be limited to the blockchain circle, and the era urgently needs to break the leader of the dilemma. At this time, Dapper Labs stood up again and launched the NBA Top Shot with the NBA, finally breaking the calm and bringing more possibilities to the industry again.
Dapper Labs is extremely focused on game development, as far as possible to polish a high-quality product that can satisfy players, they will have a special team to do market research to verify whether many ideas have a market, under such careful exploration, Dapper Labs explored a new business model, cooperation with big IP, combined with the new technology of blockchain, some traditional mature business models (such as real-life star cards) on the chain to achieve, so as to explore a new way to play.
The NBA Top Shot is a successful case, which not only changes the way fans interact with star teams, but also brings more business models and exploration directions to the fan economy, which is worth learning from other industries.
At the same time, in this process, Flow as a blockchain technology platform carrying the NBA Top Shot, only provides some features of the blockchain, real users do not need to know the Flow chain, nor do they need to know Crypto or blockchain technology, you can directly use credit cards or fiat currency to buy the corresponding NFT items, without the use of Crypto, the user's experience is not much different from the general Internet product experience.
It is in this way that the use experience is in line with the habits of the public, there is no additional learning threshold, NBA Top Shot quickly converted the original physical star card users into their own users, and successfully affected the blockchain circle, for the first time making blockchain technology widely used by ordinary users.
Dapper Labs has also been working on this approach to more sports directions, such as UFC Strike, NFL ALL DAY, and the upcoming Laliga.
Dapper Labs continues to write myths, not only verifying the feasibility of this path, but also verifying that such an innovative business model can be replicated, pointing out a good road for future blockchain applications.
4
postscript
As we stand at the crossroads of the Web2 internet, some stories are full of absurd comedies, traditional Internet giants are facing stagnant growth, frequent privacy bills, and regulatory pressure, and the business models and monetization methods that have stuck in the past 10 years seem to be being tested.
As a result, the wave of Web3 is coming from the sea one after another, and even if globalization is facing a test, the development of technology seems to be difficult to hinder, because smart resources will move in the direction of the trend, which is why teams like Dapper Labs can stand out because they are at the top of the next wave.
While the team has honed products like Crypto Cat and NBA Top Shot that have attracted global attention, as long as this innovative momentum continues, there may be more unexpected products.
As Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs, said in an interview last year, "In the future, creators and developers can publish their work or code on an open source platform, rather than being monopolized by large companies (such as Facebook, Amazon, Linkedin). We believe that eliminating these monopolies will lead to greater speed and diversity of technological innovation. ”
Perhaps, the era we are facing today is exactly like the classic "1984" advertisement released by Apple in 1984, the innovator with the hammer has emerged, and the next story is handed over to the times.
"The reason we're here is to leave a mark on the world. We want to create a whole new idea like artists and poets. (Steven Jobs)
END
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