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Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot, valued at $2.6 billion (or half the New York Knicks)


Another day, another story about the success of NFTs. This one’s about Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot: they’ve raised $305 million in new funding, bringing them up to a valuation of $2.6 billion. They could almost buy half of the New York Knicks with that money. We’re on our way to ridding ourselves of James Dolan, y’all.

Looks like they’re only getting more popular, as well. Here’s Kellen Browning for the New York Times:

Top Shot has exploded in popularity, part of a larger frenzy for cryptocurrencies and NFTs that has driven up the value of Bitcoin and led to head-turning bids for digital artwork. There have been more than three million Top Shot transactions, Dapper Labs said, generating $500 million in sales. The company makes money through the sale of the digital moments and also collects a cut whenever a moment is resold.

Dapper’s new investors include a few NBA stars as well, “including Michael Jordan, Kevin Durant, Kyle Lowry and Klay Thompson”. I might get involved if they release a Klay Thompson toaster moment.

In some ways, it’s nice to feel vindicated about my prediction for NFTs. In other, more important ways, every article about NFTs being a hit should mention how astonishingly bad they are for the environment.

It’d be interesting to know how much Dapper contributes to the problem: a lot of the furore is about Ethereum, and Dapper use their own crypto system called Flow. Haven’t seen much of anything about that, carbon wise, but it should be less energy hungry than Ethereum.



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