With a valuation of $7.6 billion and the world's most innovative company in 2022, how did Dapper Labs do it?

According to the latest analyst data from the overseas platform NonFungible.com, the total global NFT transaction volume in 2021 will exceed US$18 billion, while the corresponding 2020 will be only US$82 million, which means that in the past year, the NFT market has grown rapidly. The scale has expanded by more than 200 times. Looking at all walks of life in the past year, such data growth is 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 the representatives of the technology circle in the past year, and this has also become It is the epitome of the hot growth of NFT in the past year.

Of course, when it comes to NFTs, we may also think of American artists Beeple, NBA Top Shot, CryptoPunk and "Boring Ape", which all reflect the rapid growth that NFTs have experienced in the past year, and among these representatives, we are most surprised The big success is 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 a fan economic income of nearly 1 billion US dollars in one year after its launch, and has more than 1.5 million users, of which 80 are % is a mainstream user and has never been exposed to blockchain before.

Because of this, Dapper Labs, the developer of NBA Top Shot, has become the only Crypto company shortlisted in the 2022 World's Most Innovative Company announced by Fast Company magazine, a well-known cutting-edge business media, and ranked No. 1 among the most innovative game companies. one. At the same time, after completing last year’s financing, its valuation reached $7.6 billion, making it a well-deserved global unicorn company.

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 collectible game as NBA Top Shot, and where does the team behind it come from? ?

Dapper Labs' Growth History

Dapper Labs, founded in February 2018, aims to let 1 billion users understand the blockchain and experience the advantages of decentralization in a simpler and more fun way. In just a few years, the world's first blockchain game CryptoKitties and the popular NBA Top Shot have been created, and even a new model of commercialization in the NFT field has been developed.

Counting the development history of Dapper Labs all the way, each new project has refreshed the previous record. Similarly, Dapper Labs' achievements in the blockchain field are obvious to all, so the story of "Dapper Labs must be a high-quality product" is also popular in the circle, so how did Dapper Labs come into being?

Years of Dapper Labs and its founders

The Dapper Labs team is co-led by Roham Gharegozlou, Dieter Shirley, and Mikhael Naayem. Roham Gharegozlou was born in Iran. He has been in touch with the Internet since high school and made websites. In the third year after graduating from Stanford University, in 2012, he founded a A studio focused on mainstream applications and emerging technologies for new platforms called Axiom Zen.

The studio did not initially engage in blockchain and encryption-related business, but in 2013 Roham Gharegozlou met Dieter Shirley, who had been a development director at 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.

Ethereum

It was at this time that Roham Gharegozlou learned about the crypto industry and was attracted by the charm of blockchain, Axiom Zen gradually involved blockchain and artificial intelligence, and then the studio was still in Las Vegas in 2014 at Money 20/ 20 Hackathons won the grand prize.

Mikhael Naayem was Roham Gharegozlou's high school classmate in Paris. 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 start-up to Animoca Brands, and then Mikhael Naayem Realize: This technology has the potential to give people ownership, rights, and freedom.

After several requests from Roham Gharegozlou, Mikhael Naayem went to Canada.

In 2017, Dieter Shirley proposed the ERC-721 token standard. Before that, CryptoPunks had also explored non-fungible tokens, but they were only transformed 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 launch of the project based on Ethereum, Encrypted Cat, has caused congestion on the Ethereum network after its launch, and the “NFT” A term was also formally proposed.

Encrypted cat is popular, but Dapper Labs’ exploration in the field of encryption has not stopped. The network congestion problem caused by encrypted cat on Ethereum has exposed its shortcomings in scalability. After the popularity, it ushered in a cliff-like situation fell.

Based on the user 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' "opening" chain

With its excellent user experience and a fast, decentralized and ecologically friendly blockchain, Flow Chain not only solves the problems of throughput and cost, but also solves usability, so it has gradually entered the public eye.

The original intention of Dapper Labs to create the Flow public chain is to make it a platform for 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 the venture capital firm Venrock, once described Flow as follows: Decentralized games and encrypted collectibles and other applications place different scalability requirements on 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.

It is also the characteristics of the Flow chain that are different from other public chains. Many investment companies and institutions have seen the potential of Flow in the blockchain field. Therefore, the high investment has also provided a lot of support for the development of Flow.

At that time, CryptoKitties raised $12 million in the first round of venture capital financing, while Dapper Labs was a new company established after CryptoKitties broke away from Axiom Zen, and has completed 11 rounds of financing since Dapper Labs was established. We look at the details of Dapper Labs' funding through a table.