Why did Dapper Labs become an NFT unicorn with a valuation of $2.6 billion? (1)
Dapper Labs, the development team of NBA Top Shot, announced the completion of financing of 305 million US dollars, and the post-investment valuation rose to 2.6 billion US dollars.
Coatue, an investment institution, led the investment in this round of financing, including NBA stars Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant, Andre Iguodala, Kyle Lowry, Spencer Dinwiddie and so on. Previously, Dapper Labs worked at the year of 2020With financing of USD 11.4 million, Coinbase Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Animoca Brands, Union Square Ventures and Distributed Global participated.
Although the crypto market has entered a bull market and the amount of project financing has been rising, the financing scale of Dapper Labs is still the top three in the current market, second only to Bitland (with an investment of USD 1 billion in 2018) and BlockFi (with a financing of USD 350 million in 2021).
From CryptoKitties in 2017 to NBA Top Shot in 2020, Dapper Labs has become the No.1 unicorn in NFT field in less than 3 years.
Improve products and develop mobile games
"I think" NBA Top Shot "is one of the best ways to show how new technology can quickly change the pattern between media and fans. We are very happy to see the progress of the Flow blockchain and use this platform to connect with fans in a new way. " NBA star Kevin Durant said that he participated in this round of investment through the holding company 35 Ventures.
As the ace product of Dapper Labs, NBA Top Shot is undoubtedly an important reason to attract many stars to participate in investment.
NBA Top Shot is an NBA player card collection platform, but it does not collect traditional physical player cards. Instead, it uploads a wonderful Moment,Moment a player's career (called Moment, which may be a short video of three-pointers, dunks, assists, etc.) to the blockchain to make a unique NFT. Players can buy, sell and display NFT products.
From the data point of view, NBA Top Shot has a strong market appeal, and it is a hot NFT collection among fans. At present, the highest unit price in the game is the dunk instant NFT thrown by lebron james in the game against Houston Rockets on February 6, 2020, with a price of $250,000. This number has far exceeded the average physical fan card.
Lebron james dunks instantly
Since the release of the public beta version in October last year, the total sales volume of NBA Top Shot has been close to 500 million US dollars in the past six months, with 826,000 registered accounts, of which 338,000 accounts hold NFT (that is, at least one transaction has been generated). Especially in the last two months, the number of users has increased by 20 times, and the volume of transactions has also exploded: the sales volume in March was US$ 221 million, and the total sales volume in February was US$ 232 million, which was more than five times higher than the US$ 44 million in January.
Due to the proliferation of users and the shortage of official auditors, the withdrawal of users is blocked, and a large amount of funds have been deposited in the NBA Top Shot account. This popularity also makes the government have to take some restrictions, such as suspending website registration and buying only one Moment every two hours.
Roham Gharegozlou, CEO and founder of Dapper Labs, told Forbes that Top Shot has tripled the scale of its fraud prevention and compliance team in the past two weeks, and plans to double it next week to cope with the relieved user pressure. The funds obtained from this round of financing will also be used to further solve the above problems, and no new functions have been added to Top Shot.
According to the official disclosure of Dapper Labs, it is developing a mobile game called NBA Hardcourt, which will bring more user scenes to NBA Top Shot. For example, in mobile games, players can compete against each other and bring Moments from NBA Top Shot to the stadium to provide energy for the team, or show their collections through TV screens, VR, AR and other products in the physical world.
The initial success of NBA Top Shot has stimulated people's confidence in NFT. Dapper Labs also hopes to cooperate with other IP holders in sports and entertainment fields (purchase copyright) through this financing, and replicate the successful model of Top Shot. At present, Dapper Labs has announced the establishment of partnership with WNBA and UFC.
WNBA is a professional women's basketball league sponsored by NBA. UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, is the world's top and largest professional mixed fighting competition. )
"In the crypto industry, few teams can successfully develop blockchain, wallet and launch popular applications at the same time. The Dapper Labs team has completed these tasks very well. I think most people have not realized that they have succeeded." Fred Wilson said. He is the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a venture capital company, and participated in the A-round investment of Axiom Zen (predecessor of Dapper Labs) in 2017.