Today’s NFT project developers are faced with a conundrum as they reach the close of a record-breaking year for NFTs, which saw more than $10 billion in transaction volume, whether to pursue today’s cash or tomorrow’s customers. For years, Roham Gharegozlou has been betting on the success of NFTs. It occurred this year. In 2017, Gharegozlou and the team at his firm, Dapper Labs, released CryptoKitties, the first popular blockchain game. Late last year, the company launched NBA Top Shot, which quickly took off and drew international attention to the crypto-collectibles industry.
We spoke with the Dapper Labs CEO last week at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 about the problems confronting the crypto market, Ethereum’s future, and swiftly NFTs exploded this year. “I expected it would be quick,” Gharegozlou said, “but NBA Top Shot grew from 4,000 to 400,000 users in a couple of weeks.”
Dapper Labs has become a venture darling as a result of Top Shot’s success; the business secured a $250 million investment round last week, valuing the company at $7.6 billion, the enormous value recognition to the promise of Dapper Labs’ platform for other consumer-focused blockchain developers, as well as a bet on the future success of Top Shot.
The company has created its own blockchain, named Flow, in order to avoid the Ethereum blockchain, which is used by the great majority of successful NFT platforms today. That, according to Dapper Labs, will not be the case for long.
“We spent roughly $30 million in the first year or year and a half of Dapper Labs attempting to develop on Ethereum.” “We attempted developing the user experience you see on Top Shot on top of Ethereum when we launched Dapper Wallet,” he continues.
“We found there were a number of problems. There is cost, scale, throughput, and all of these factors, but at the end of the day, it is all about the user experience. When constructing a protocol and blockchain for financially smart traders or extremely hardcore Defi stuff, the user experience you build for them isn’t the same trade-offs you desire when building for consumer apps.”
