The growth history of Dapper Labs: how to achieve a valuation of 7.6 billion US dollars?
Original source: MetaverseHub
Original source: MetaverseHub
According to the latest analyst data from the overseas platform NonFungible.com, the total global NFT turnover in 2021 will exceed US$18 billion, while the corresponding figure in 2020 will be only US$82 million. The scale has expanded by more than 200 times. Looking at all walks of life in the past year, such data growth is really rare.
Among the 12 hot words in the technology circle in 2021 announced by the well-known media "Reuters" at the end of last year, 12 words such as NFT, Metaverse, Web3, and fab have become representatives of the technology circle in the past year, and this has also become It is the epitome of NFT's explosive growth in the past year.
Of course, when it comes to NFT, we may also think of American artists Beeple, NBA Top Shot, CryptoPunk and "Boring Ape". These all reflect the rapid growth that NFT has experienced in the past year, and among these representatives, we are most surprised The most important thing is the great success of the commercialization of NBA Top Shot.
Judging from the data of the Beta version of NBA Top Shot, the user retention rate has reached 90%. It has reached nearly 1 billion US dollars in fan economic income within one year since its launch, and has more than 1.5 million users, of which 80 % are mainstream users and have never been exposed to blockchain before.
So, what kind of company is Dapper Labs, why has it suddenly become the most innovative company in the world, what is the reason for creating such a representative collection game like NBA Top Shot, and where does the team behind it come from? ?
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The History of Dapper Labs
Counting the development of Dapper Labs along the way, every new project has refreshed the previous records. Similarly, the achievements of Dapper Labs in the blockchain field are obvious to all, so the story of "Dapper Labs must be a boutique" has also become popular in the circle, so how did Dapper Labs come into being?
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The years of Dapper Labs and its founders
The Dapper Labs team is jointly led by Roham Gharegozlou, Dieter Shirley, and Mikhael Naayem. Roham Gharegozlou was born in Iran. He has been in contact with the Internet since high school and made websites. In the third year after graduating from Stanford University, that is, in 2012, he founded a A studio focused on mainstream applications of new platforms and emerging technologies, called Axiom Zen.
The studio was not engaged in blockchain and encryption-related businesses at the beginning, but in 2013 Roham Gharegozlou met Dieter Shirley, who had been the development director of Atimi Software and a senior software engineer at Apple, who had read the Bitcoin white paper. He is using his home computer to mine his first bitcoin.
It was at this time that Roham Gharegozlou learned about the encryption industry and was attracted by the charm of the blockchain. Axiom Zen gradually involved blockchain and artificial intelligence, and then the studio was also at Money 20/ in Las Vegas in 2014. 20 grand prizes were won at the hackathon.
Mikhael Naayem was Roham Gharegozlou's high school classmate in Paris. When Roham Gharegozlou found Mikhael Naayem and told him about the world of blockchain, he had just sold his mobile game platform-as-a-service start-up to Animoca Brands, and then Mikhael Naayem Realize: This technology has the potential to give people ownership, power and freedom.
After several requests from Roham Gharegozlou, Mikhael Naayem left for Canada.
In 2017, Dieter Shirley proposed the ERC-721 token standard. Before that, CryptoPunks had also explored non-homogeneous tokens, but they only modified it on the basis of 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 CryptoKitties, a project developed based on Ethereum, came out, which caused congestion on the Ethereum network after its launch, and the "NFT" A term was also formally proposed.
Based on the user experience and the long-term development of the team, Roham Gharegozlou and his team decided to establish a new company and built their own public chain - Flow Network.
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Dapper Labs' "open hanging" chain
With its excellent user experience and a fast, decentralized and eco-friendly blockchain, the Flow chain not only solves the problems of throughput and cost, but also solves the problem of usability, so it gradually enters the public's field of vision.
The original intention of Dapper Labs to create the Flow public chain is to build it as a platform for high-performance Dapps and games. Not only decentralized games, but also various forms of NFT can develop their own ecology in the Flow ecosystem.
David Pakman, a partner of the venture capital firm Venrock, once described Flow as follows: applications such as decentralized games and encrypted collectibles have different scalability requirements for the blockchain, and sharding cannot solve this problem at all. Therefore, Dapper Labs created Flow, hoping to expand the users of decentralized games to tens of millions.
At that time, CryptoKitties raised $12 million in the first round of venture capital financing, and Dapper Labs was a new company established after CryptoKitties broke away from Axiom Zen. It has completed 11 rounds of financing since the establishment of Dapper Labs. We use a table to learn more about Dapper Labs' financing.
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Data source: crunchbase
Although Dapper Labs uses time as a bet to build a new generation of blockchain, the rise of Dapper Labs can already be seen from its development in just a few years.
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What are some popular products developed by Dapper Labs?
In December 2020, Roham Gharegozlou, founder and CEO of Dapper Labs, gave a presentation titled "Why Are NBA, UFC, and Ubisoft Embracing Blockchain?" " said in his speech that only fun things can promote the popularization of blockchain technology.
Gharegozlou believes that ease of use and scalability are important foundations for the development of blockchain ecology, and the audience of the ecosystem is also crucial.
Based on this, Dapper Labs has never stopped. They have joined forces with many well-known organizations such as the NBA, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), Warner Music Group, Spanish Football League, and the National Football League. A listed game company reached cooperation and developed a series of popular products.
When it comes to Dapper Labs' products, the most well-known one should be Cryptokitties. Cryptokitties is the world's first blockchain game, currently has more than 130,000 users and 2.01 million Cryptokitties.
Cryptokitties once caused the gas fee of Ethereum to skyrocket, and also strengthened Gharegozlou's determination to create a new blockchain.
In May 2019, Dapper Labs launched the Ethereum-based game CheezeWizards, creating the first battle royale type blockchain game and creating a new style of blockchain games.
In October 2020, Dapper Labs' blockchain Flow, which was built in 2018, was officially launched. Currently, the Flow chain has more than 1,000 projects in preparation and is a fast, decentralized, and developer-friendly blockchain.
At the same time as the launch of the Flow chain, Dapper Labs also launched the public beta version of NBA Top Shot, which ignited the enthusiasm of the entire network for NFT. Fans can collect and take ownership of the best moments of NBA superstars, fulfilling the long-cherished wish of NBA loyal fans for many years. Currently, the total transaction volume of NBA Top Shot has exceeded 1 billion US dollars, and the total sales volume has exceeded 11 million.
Later, Dapper Labs launched its decentralized application, Dapper Wallets, dedicated to building a trustworthy portal to the digital world and providing support for users to purchase and store digital assets. everything. Currently Dapper Wallets has more than 2 million users and processed more than 20 million transactions.
In October 2021, Flow integrated the Filecoin storage service to realize NFT's vision of more decentralization, ensuring that holders and issuers' NFTs "can be safely used anywhere."
At the same time, Dapper Labs has also reached a cooperation with the National Football League (NFL) to launch an American football NFT market equivalent to NBA Top Shot on Flow. NFL ALL DAY was officially launched at the end of the Super Bowl in February 2022 and generated $15 million in gross sales in a short period of time.
Before the release of NFL ALL DAY, Dapper Labs reached a cooperation with UFC and launched UFC Strike based on Flow. UFC Strike allows fans to build their own digital files to collect NFT 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.
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.
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Why is Dapper Labs repeatedly out of the circle?
The reason why DapperLabs has been able to get out of the circle repeatedly is because it has made several successful games? Created an advanced blockchain platform for the blockchain world? Or is it because some innovative business models have been explored? It can be said that these reasons are the main reasons, but it can also be said that they are not.
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user experience
user experience
User experience is critical to the widespread adoption of blockchain technology. When Dapper Labs’ CryptoKitties became popular across the industry as the first blockchain game, the honor it brought did not make them feel too proud. Instead, they felt many problems from this experience, such as Ethereum’s own Performance is very limited, and transfer fees are very high.
For Dapper Labs who wants to popularize blockchain technology to the mainstream, the current Ethereum, or even the future upgraded Ethereum 2.0 is not the platform that Dapper Labs wants. After successively inspecting multiple emerging blockchain public chains, Dapper Labs still has not found a blockchain platform that meets their vision.
Therefore, in order to realize a blockchain platform capable of carrying tens of millions of users, they independently launched a new high-performance public chain Flow Network.
From the understanding of Dapper Labs, in order to realize the popularization of blockchain, there must be a platform that can support consumer-level applications, as well as applications that can support millions of users. The performance of these applications should not be comparable to that of The existing Internet is too poor. At the same time, any operation in it should be as free or extremely low-cost as possible, and users do not need to understand blockchain technology when using these applications.
At present, most of the blockchain applications are aimed at people who are familiar with the basic operations of the blockchain, but such people must be only a minority of the vast user group. Based on such a crowd, it is difficult to achieve mainstream adoption of blockchain technology.
At present, there are already multiple blockchain applications on the Flow chain that are implementing this goal. NBA Top Shot is one of them. It quickly introduces traditional NBA star card users in a short period of time. These users do not understand NBA Top Shot can be played without the blockchain, thus obtaining a user experience similar to that of the traditional Internet. This also allowed NBA Top Shot to quickly break through 1 million users and generate more than $100 million in revenue.
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developer friendly
Developers have always been an important cornerstone of ecological development, and the Dapper Labs team, itself a developer of blockchain ecological applications, understands the various difficulties and needs of developers in the development process.
Therefore, when Dapper Labs designed the Flow public chain, on the one hand, it considered from the perspective of how to launch a higher-performance and easier-to-use blockchain platform to meet the requirements of users; How to develop more easily during development to promote the birth of more blockchain use cases.
Cadence, a new smart contract language, has been adopted on the Flow chain, and has subverted the current state of Ethereum's smart contract programming, fundamentally introducing a new concept, and transferring the account implementation method from Ethereum's central ledger to Flow's distributed resource approach.
Compared with Ethereum's Solidity, the smart contracts written by Flow's Cadence are more decentralized, enhance security, and support advanced use cases such as resource nesting and combination.
In addition, the network design of the Flow chain is driven by results. It has an upgradable smart contract, which is convenient for developers to iteratively upgrade the application, and Flow can also support built-in logging to the Flow simulator, which is convenient for developers to further adjust.
A number of innovative technologies make Flow fast and convenient in development, which has been widely recognized by developers.
Even Ubisoft is full of praise for the Flow chain, saying that Flow allows them to focus on the logic of the DApp. This is also the reason why the ecology of the Flow chain is developing at a high speed and continues to launch explosive projects.
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Model innovation
With a more performant platform, and an easier-to-develop smart contract language and functionality, it seems that Dapper Labs is getting closer to their goal.
However, these advantages can only be regarded as good "tools" in "To do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools". The factor that really makes Dapper Labs make great strides and gradually approach the goal is that Dapper Labs continues to explore new models.
The success brought by each new model will inspire developers of other blockchain applications and lead the development direction of the industry.
As early as 2017, Dapper Labs launched the ERC721 standard and the world's first blockchain game CryptoKitties. At the time when blockchain technology was only used for homogeneous tokens, this series of innovations by Dapper Labs was like a nuclear bomb, shocking all participants in the industry.
Since then, the blockchain industry has ushered in the era of NFT, and Axie Infinity, a leading chain game project that is flourishing today, has many references to CryptoKitties.
However, CryptoKitties also made Dapper Labs realize that such a blockchain application has a high threshold, and it can only attract those who have basic knowledge of the blockchain, and it is difficult to be widely used.
The mainstream adoption of blockchain must not be limited to the blockchain circle, and the era urgently needs leaders who break through the predicament. At this time, Dapper Labs stood up again and launched the NBA Top Shot together with the NBA, which finally broke the calm and brought more possibilities to the industry again.
Dapper Labs is extremely focused on game development, trying to polish a high-quality product that can satisfy players. They will have a dedicated team to do market research to verify whether many ideas have a market. Under such careful exploration, Dapper Labs explored a new business model, cooperated with big IP, combined with the new technology of blockchain, put some traditional mature business models (such as real-life star cards) on the chain, and explored new play.
NBA Top Shot is a successful case. It not only changed the interaction between fans and Odaily teams, but also brought 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 the blockchain technology platform carrying 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. The corresponding NFT items can be purchased directly with a credit card or legal currency without using Crypto, and the user experience is not much different from the general Internet product experience.
It is precisely in this way that the user experience is in line with the public's usage habits, and there is no additional learning threshold. NBA Top Shot quickly converted the original physical star card users into its own users, and successfully affected outside the blockchain circle. For the first time This makes blockchain technology widely used by ordinary users.
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postscript
postscript
As we stand at the crossroads of the Web2 Internet, some stories are full of absurd comedy. Traditional Internet giants face stagnant growth, frequent introduction of privacy bills, and regulatory pressure. Profitability appears to be under test.
Therefore, waves of Web3 are coming from the sea one after another. Even if globalization is facing challenges, the development of technology seems to be difficult to be hindered, because smart resources will move in the direction of the trend, which is why things like Teams like Dapper Labs stand out because they are on top of the next wave.
Although the team has polished products that have attracted global attention such as Encryption Kitties and NBA Top Shot, as long as this innovation 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 works or codes on an open source platform instead of being monopolized by large companies (such as Facebook, Amazon, Linkedin) . We believe that eliminating these monopolies will lead to an even greater increase in the speed and diversity of technological innovation.”
Perhaps, the era we are facing now is just like the classic "1984" advertisement released by Apple in 1984. Innovators with hammers in hand have appeared, and the next story is left to the times.
