Could these stars in the circle make the next CryptoKitties “Top Shot”?
Top Shot, the NBA-themed digital playing card that hopes to bring blockchain to the masses.
Dapper networks
What happens when you mix $ 61 million dollars, top adventurer capitalists, NBA stars flying high and boredom heads that almost broke the Ethereum? We are going to find out.
Dapper Labs, the creator of CryptoKitties, has launched Top Shot, a blockchain-based digital trading card. Group statistics and video clips of NBA licensed players into digital “tabs”. Cards are released in groups, where legendary players are rare and steal a dozen dozen.
Users can share, buy, sell and exchange Top Shot cards on the Dapper app. So they can acquire a fierce crush of Sion Williamson, a Eurostep of Giannis Antetokounmpo or even the crush of the Rock “Baby the Baby” of 1983 against the Los Angeles Lakers. The rarity of the cards is ensured by an immutable and decentralized blockchain Dapper called Flow.
Dapper simultaneously announced a new investment round of $ 12 million dollars (in addition to the $ 49 million previously raised, according to Crunchbase), some of which come from NBA stars Spencer Dinwiddie * and Garrett Temple of the Brooklyn Nets, Aaron Gordon of Orlando Magic, Andre Iguodala * of the Miami Heat and JaVale McGee of the Los Angeles Lakers.
“These guys have a vision of where blockchain can go,” says Dinwiddie. “This is a strategic investment for me, because I believe in what Dapper is doing, not only with Top Shot but also with the Flow blockchain.”
Vancouver-based Dapper was already supported by some of the biggest names in venture capital, including Andreessen Horowitz Chris Dixon,* Union Square Ventures Fred Wilson * e David Pakman of Venrock.
The firm’s money took over Dapper after the wild success of CryptoKitties, which stifled the Ethereum network in December 2017. The angry interest in the art collectible game became up to 11.8% of the Ethereum smart-contract traffic and has paralyzed the network globally. These problems also sparked interest in alternative crypto currencies such as Litecoin and XRP *, accelerating that winter’s cryptic fever.
For Dapper, those Ethereum problems were the inspiration for creating a custom coin.
“We heard that everyone was coming to cryptocurrencies from a” currency “and” financial trading “perspective and that’s about it,” says Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs. “We saw it as an application platform. This is the root of Flow. “
The root of the NBA are the most blocked hits of the blockchain. But the functional blockchain is right in the wheelhouse of the star Dinwiddie of Brooklyn Nets.
Brooklyn Net Spencer Dinwiddie has a growing blockchain investment portfolio (March 8, 2020 … [+]
Getty Images
“It’s about transparency and liquidity,” says Dinwiddie. “If the ledger is public and you can see the transaction. You don’t have to believe in parties, you just have to believe in the middle. And when you tokenize things, you have the ability to move this value digitally, every time. If this fits your sector, if it is valuable and functional, these are the practical applications I am trying to find. “
He may have found one in Dapper. Already the company claims that tests with a handful of users have yielded $ 2,000 dollars of rare LeBron James Top Shot cards, cards purchased for a fraction of that cost.
“This investment is a strategic synergistic relationship,” says Dinwiddie. “I have a team and we do our homework. It depends on the terms and the project itself. It’s not just me who writes a check. “
To be on the safe side, there are many companies trying to extract trading cards from the era of bicycle spokes. Bubblegum card king Topps said he sold $ 204,800 of “Garbage Pail Kids” digital cards using the WAX blockchain just last month. Take-Two Interactive’s NBA 2K20 (TTWO: NASDAQ) is full of collectible players and micropayments. It sold 14 million copies – for $ 840 million dollars – and during the second quarter of Covid-19, revenue from “cards” and tradable players increased 126% year-on-year.
But it’s not the NBA or the memorabilia that inspire Gharegozlou – it’s the original promise of Bitcoin. More than anything else, he sees the collectible market as proof that blockchain technology has a functional purpose beyond, well, collecting.
“Top Shot embodies cryptocurrency values,” says Gharegozlou. “It’s the idea that the thing you own is truly yours and nobody should take it away from you. The idea that digital things should be permanent. And that developers should be able to build on it. These are very abstract concepts, very difficult for people to wrap their heads around. With Top Shot, someone can get out of the way and in thirty seconds he has a crypto wallet, swaps cryptography, is using a high-performance blockchain – and he doesn’t even know it. “
It could be a dunk.
.
