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24/08/2021 How NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs is mainstreaming NFTs
Within a year of launching NBA Top Shot, the company behind it, Dapper Labs, is valued at more than $7.5 billion—and pushing NFTs into the mainstream.
Last October, NBA fans were greeted by a new online marketplace for basketball collectibles. Called NBA Top Shot, it allows users to buy, collect, and trade video clip packets of NBA players and moments, like a LeBron James dunk or a Vince Carter three-pointer. It uses blockchain technology to authenticate these videos and create an indelible certificate of ownership.
Within just eight months of its launch, NBA Top Shot had reached a million users and notched more than $700 million in total sales. The company behind it, Dapper Labs, is now valued at more than $7.5 billion. And the world of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, has exploded.
On this week’s Most Innovative Companies podcast, Roham Gharegozlou, cofounder and CEO of Dapper Labs, which Fast Company recognized as one of the Most Innovative Gaming Companies of 2021, talks about how his company is fueling the NTF explosion with NBA Top Shot and its Flow platform, which allows other developers to create and launch their own NFT products and marketplaces.
Gharegozlou acknowledges that one of the biggest triumphs of NBA Top Shot is that it’s not directed at the crypto community: Many of its users aren’t familiar with the world of cryptocurrencies and NFTs, but they innately understand the value of what Top Shot offers. “More than 80% of users just use a credit card. They don’t have cryptocurrency,” he says. “We want them to like [NBA Top Shot] for the benefits it gives them rather than for the details of the technology. The core thing about Top Shot is, if you buy something, you’ll be able to sell it. It’s under your control. . . . It’s kind of analogous to [the idea that] you don’t need to understand HTTPS security to order something from Amazon. You just need to know my credit card information is safe and I’ll get the things within 48 hours.”
With some NBA Top Shot items going for upwards of $200,000—a LeBron James dunk highlight sold for $387,600 in April—the site has attracted some serious collectors. But the game also sells $9 starter packs, with three video highlights apiece. “We want to make sure it’s actually accessible to every kind of NBA fan,” says Gharegozlou, who wants to increase ownership opportunities for everyone. He sees NBA Top Shot as particularly appealing to gamers—especially NBA 2K users—who are used to spending money on swag for their players and teams. “But they don’t actually have ownership of those moments,” he says.
In the future, he says, users will have access to even more experiences built atop Top Shot—games that play with the idea of a fantasy league and ways of displaying collectibles to other people. These will further benefit from blockchain’s transparency. Unlike in the physical card market, anyone will be able to track exactly when a Top Shot collectible was purchased, by whom, and for how much.
While NBA Top Shot makes non-fungible, digital collectibles appealing to the general public, Dapper Labs is busy wooing developers who want to create similar products onto Flow, its blockchain-based platform for apps, games, and the digital assets that power them. The company’s investors include players from the NFL and MLB, and Dapper Labs already has deals with the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and Fantastec SWAP, a company that makes digital collectibles for elite soccer teams—which means more video sports collectibles for professional leagues are coming.
“This is the first time [these leagues] can actually engage with their fans in a way that sort of gives the fans direct control,” Gharegozlou says. “It gives the league continued secondary sales revenue. It really changed the game in terms of how they think about monetizing their content in a digital world.” (Dapper Labs has growing competition in this space: Sport-merchandise giant Fanatics recently launched its own Ethereum-based collectibles platform and has inked a deal with MLB.)
The Flow platform isn’t just being used for sports. Some 400 companies are already building and testing products on Flow, including the avatar company Genies, which is creating a new marketplace for digital goods. (Dapper Labs recently invested in Genies.) Gharegozlou also points to crypto-native companies that are using Flow to break up NFTs into tokens that could trade on an exchange and Chainmonsters, a massive multiplayer online game that’s a sort of blockchain-based Pokémon.
According to Gharegozlou, NBA Top Shot is just the tip of the iceberg. “We see our role [in the beginning] as: We’re going to build unique, exclusive content that only we can build, and that’s going to bring the initial set of users,” he says. And then, with the adoption of Flow by a community of developers, comes the real flourishing of NFT-based products and experiences: “Everything from there is up to what’s shaping up to be a really impressive community—and we want to support the community.”
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https://www.fastcompany.com/90668050/how-nba-top-shot-creator-dapper-labs-is-mainstreaming-nfts
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Dreaming at Dusk
More than 15 years ago, Tor onion services were brought to digital life. An ecosystem of onions has been blooming ever since. To commemorate this landmark in the history of privacy, we collaborated with @ixshells to create a one-of-a-kind digital artifact: a generative art piece derived using the private key of the very first onion service, duskgytldkxiuqc6.onion. This auction benefits the Tor Project, the nonprofit protecting your human right to privacy. 1020*1280 / 60fps / .mp4 / RSA1024
The Blockchain
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OthersideDeployer
Alex in Wonderland
A figure, Alex, stands mostly naked in the midst of a physical and psychological maelstrom. He is clad only in nostalgic 80’s era socks, on a tenuous island between active waters and a variety of shark denizens. Sharks on the right side of the image are all beached, including a shark with a quartz crystal snout, an orange shark wrapped in a life buoy, and a shark further in the distance wearing an 80’s style shirt with the number “88”. On the left side is the largest shark, wearing bright glossy red lipstick and brandishing prominent teeth with braces. She is cordoned off from the figure by a roped float divider, and within her thought bubble is a warning symbol.
Behind the figure, hovering in the air, are Grey aliens emerging from the distance, out of a series of elliptical UFO shaped interdimensional membranes. The Greys take on the visual form of spermazoa ostensibly impregnating the interdimensional thresholds. As is typical, these Greys inhabit a zone just behind the unconscious topology of Alex’s dissociative mind.
Though Alex’s bottom half is representative, his top half mutates into a psychological cornucopia. In a manner akin to “Auto-Erotic Sphinx”, a predecessor work, the figure has self suctioned—an act of sensual infatuation, enjoyment, and exploration.
Upward exists the figure’s primary conscious eye, adorned with a revolutionary beret emblazoned with a Bitcoin badge. The figure’s summit features the nose of a fighter jet facing off against video game Bullet Bills, one of whom is marked by a communist North Korean star. A cropped section of a UFO observes the contest.
Alex’s mind branches both left and right. To the left is more singular embodied consciousness, manifesting two eyes and a Ganesh trunk grasping crayons. The right branch dissociates upward diagonally, emerging into an array of eyes, faces, teeth, tail, a unicorn horn, and much more—all of which participate in expressing his unconscious being; a democracy of psychic factions representing thought impressions and associations. All illumination and darkness– fernal, infernal, high consciousness and corporeal underbelly–reside in this realm.
In the distance are relatively languid, light clouds, and against the firmament hovers a colossal distant eye peering over the scene and far beyond.
This painting possesses underlying genetic traits with previous works such as “Auto-Erotic Sphinx with Toys”, “Dionysus”, and “Fuku-Shiva”. The work serves also as a nod to an earlier period of art inspiration during late teens and early twenties— born out of the nakedness, vulnerability, curiosity, and wonder inherent to coming of age and all subsequent psychedelic revelation.