Dapper Labs, the development team of NBA Top Shot, raised US$305 million in the latest round of financing, with a valuation of US$2.6 billion.
Original title: “Will the craze of NBA Top Shot make it a competitor to Ethereum?” 》
Written by: Brett Knight, working for Forbes Magazine Compilation: Blockchain Knight
Five months after entering the public beta, NBA Top Shot has processed more than 3 million transactions and reached sales of US$460 million in the secondary market. Now, as collectors’ interest in NFTs has reached a frenetic level, the creators of the platform have also reached a jaw-dropping level of development.
Dapper Labs raised US$305 million in the latest round of financing , led by technology-focused investment company Coatue, which valued the three-year-old startup company at US$2.6 billion. This round of financing was recently announced, bringing the total financing of this Vancouver-based startup to $357 million.
Roham Gharegozlou, CEO and founder of Dapper Labs, said that “there is more fuel in the tank,” and Forbes describes the funds as “big bets on open platforms.”
This is a unique digital asset bet on NFT based on blockchain technology through a ledger. For NBA Top Shot, this means selling the highlights of NBA game videos and packaged as a digital sports card. The price of the packages depends on the rarity of the clips they contain, ranging from $9 to $230 for three to ten minutes.
At the same time, Dapper Labs can take a slice of the transaction between users and charge a 5% transaction fee for each transaction in the secondary market. However, the price of NBA Top Shot is unstable, and the volume of NBA Top Shot is different due to the player’s performance, injuries and trading players.
However, overall demand is soaring. In the past 30 days, NBA Top Shot has reached a transaction volume of more than 200 million U.S. dollars in the secondary market, which means that Dapper Labs will charge an annual transaction fee of 120 million U.S. dollars . In addition, it will also receive funds from the initial package sale.
So far, this figure is close to 49 million U.S. dollars. At the same time, the company will distribute the proceeds to the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association.
With the benefits of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the value of the NFT primary market has almost quadrupled in 2020, surpassing 250 million U.S. dollars. According to a report provided by retailers and entertainment companies, this is just the beginning.
Music artists including Mike Shinoda and Leon Kings have released songs and albums in the form of NFTs in the past few weeks. The NFT frenzy reached its climax this month. A digital composite work created by a digital artist named Beeple, Mike Winkelmann, was sold at Christie’s for $69.3 million.
As the leading application in this field, NBA Top Shot now has more than 800,000 registered accounts, of which 338,000 users have at least one minute, which makes the scale of the platform an order of magnitude larger than other NFT projects .
Miami Heat player Andre Iguodala said: “You can’t predict the development of the NBA Top Shot today. If someone told you at the time, you would definitely say they were lying.” Iguodala last year In the summer, I started investing in Dapper Labs and joined this new round of financing plan.
Other investors in this round include Andreessen Horowitz, Chernin Group, Union Square Ventures and VenRock, as well as Lotte Hornets owner and basketball legend Michael Jordan and Sacramento Kings’ Vivek Ranadiff. There are also more than 30 professional athletes, including Brooklyn Nets forward Kevin Durant, St. Louis Cardinals third baseman Nolan Arenado and Buffalo Bills Stephen Diggs and others.
This is not the first time Gharegozlou has tried NFT business. Earlier, he designed a game called “CryptoKitties” that allows users to collect and breed cats as NFTs.
This game almost overwhelms the Ethereum blockchain it uses, because the cost of completing a transaction is related to the traffic on the system, and its price soared from 1 cent to a few dollars, making users’ interest quickly weakened.
Gharegozlou founded Dapper Labs in 2018 and led the IP, team and technology of CryptoKitties to start a new attempt, but he soon decided to build his own blockchain platform Flow instead of repeating his experience on Ethereum .
NBA Top Shot was launched last spring, and soon began to be sold in a limited private beta, and opened to the public in October. So far it has proven capable of handling a certain number of user groups, Gharegozlou said, in the past two months alone, the number of users has increased by 20 times.
When talking about the difference between NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, 35-year-old Gharegozlou said: “Our transaction volume in the past year was achieved within one day of NBA Top Shot.”
As the encrypted art market VIV3.com runs on Flow, companies such as Warner Music Group and game developer Animoca are also developing products on the platform.
For NBA Top Shot, there are still challenges. Users complained about the delayed release of the software package, the interruption of the website, and the unintelligence of the customer service robots. This is a common problem in e-commerce , leading to long queues of potential collectors. For example, the release of a software package attracted 400,000 users, most of whom left empty-handed.
The process of cashing out the NFT is also one of the reasons for the company’s criticism. The company requires users to go through customs clearance before withdrawing money. This regulation is designed to prevent XI money and enable companies to comply with financial regulations. However, the recent surge in the number of users has caused a large backlog of approval teams, which means that tens of thousands of users have funds in NBA Top Shot accounts, and they cannot Was transferred to the real world.
Gharegozlou said that in the past two weeks, NBA Top Shot has reduced the number of service tickets by 90% and quadrupled the size of its fraud prevention and compliance team, and plans to double it again next week.
The company stated in a blog posted on Saturday that the number of users who received withdrawals has exceeded 28,000, an increase of 450% in four weeks. Dapper also tried to limit the number of new users and the frequency of transactions to solve some of the problems caused by the influx of users.
The introduction of new funds will be used to further solve these problems and add new features to the NBA Top Shot , but Gharegozlou also hopes to attract third-party developers to reach agreements with other intellectual property holders in the sports or entertainment field to copy the ordinary NBA Top Shot. The company has announced a partnership with WNBA and UFC.
Gharegozlou said: “We did not focus on the rush and copy and paste. We believe that the reason why the NBA Top Shot arouses everyone’s interest is because it will become a sustainable economic system, and this is indeed basketball. A major feature.”
Gharegozlou added: “We hope it can become the currency of circulation for proponents of the cryptocurrency market.”
Source link: www.forbes.com
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