Dapper Labs may be the slam dunk for mainstreaming NFTs

The Future. Dapper Labs is making NFTs accessible with NBA Top Shot by removing the need to understand crypto and focusing on the competitive nature of collecting. Now that it has people’s attention, the company is opening up its NFT-creation platform to brands that want to mimic the NBA’s success… which could move all die-hard sports communities onto the blockchain and mint a new revenue model for monetizing fandom.

NFT everything
As NBA Top Shot pushes NFTs into the mainstream, its creator, Dapper Labs, may be the top contributor to spiking Google searches for “What the heck is an NFT?”

• Refresher: NBA Top Shot allows users to buy, collect, and trade NFT-minted video clips of NBA players and moments, “like a LeBron James dunk or a Vince Carter three-pointer.”
  • In eight months, the platform saw $700 million in sales.
• Dapper Labs is now valued at $7.5 billion.

What makes Top Shot such a success is that users don’t need to know anything about crypto in order to use it. “More than 80% of users just use a credit card. They don’t have cryptocurrency,” says Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs, “we want them to like [NBA Top Shot] for the benefits it gives them rather than for the details of the technology.

Next up, Dapper Labs is building fantasy-like games within Top Shot and a hub for users to show off their collections — features that will only cement the social aspect of the platform.