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The CryptoKitties continue to multiply. Dapper Labs, the company behind consumer blockchain collectible cats, raised $ 15 million in a new round of financing.
Venrock led the investment, with the participation of Google GV and Samsung Next. The funds will help Dapper Labs, a Canadian company, expand locally and globally.
This includes the creation of an American subsidiary led by former executives of Unity and Disney, with additional recruitments for the office in Canada from Ubisoft, EA Sports, Amazon, ESPN, Hasbro and Zynga. The investment will also accelerate the construction of the infrastructure necessary to attract traditional consumers to the blockchain. It's a difficult task, but Dapper Labs is trying.
"The evolution of true digital ownership and the interoperability of smart contracts creates new ways for consumers, creators and platform providers to fully interact with peers, without intermediaries," said Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs. "Our mission at Dapper Labs is to use games and entertainment to bring decentralization values to billions of consumers around the world.This funding round was to bring the right partners around the table to bring interesting content to the blockchain and make sure that the usability and the infrastructure allow the adoption by traditional consumers ".
Dapper Labs is also working with the best entertainment brands to bring interesting brands, communities and intellectual property to the blockchain.
Above: CryptoKitties has created a craze for blockchain in games.
Image of credit: Axiom Zen
The new loan includes the participation of the great entertainment weights William Morris Endeavor (WME); eSports leader aXiomatic; and the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund. The company also revealed several additional investors from the previous round of financing, including Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo; Steve Huffman, founder and CEO of Reddit; and Green Bay Ventures.
"The Dapper Labs team impressed us with their vision – more than any other company in this industry, they understand and aim to reach the mainstream consumer," said David Pakman, a partner of Venrock and now a member of the Dapper Labs committee. "The blockchain will introduce a sector of scarce digital resources and will allow for new types of self-expression, in combination with the transition from centralized to peer-to-peer commerce, this will unlock trillions of dollars in value for consumers."
CryptoKitties is the most widely used blockchain consumer application in the world outside of the stock exchanges, with transactions of 3.2 million and tens of millions of dollars made on the platform.
The game was launched at the end of 2017 to show the use of blockchain beyond cryptocurrencies.
"We launched CryptoKitties as an innovative and driven introduction to what blockchain can do and mean for consumers," says Dieter Shirley, the company's chief technology officer and original author of the non-fungible token (NFT) standard popularized on Ethereum as ERC-721, in a statement. "By involving the community with fun and games, we have reached a much broader audience, which has taught us where the obstacles and opportunities for blockchain and mainstreaming are, and we can not wait to share what we have learned with the rest of the world. "
Above: Criptokitties is entering a museum in Germany.
Image of credit: CryptoKitties
Dapper Labs intends to use its consumer knowledge to reduce the barrier to entry to blockchain and to make decentralization values accessible to all.
The company claimed that the NFT standard created by CryptoKitties has created a new industry and new possibilities for digital ownership. Since the launch of CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs has established a program for developers and public APIs, innovated in terms of service and set up a flexible license that offers owners of NFT and third-party developers extensive usage rights over their work. original art and has created a launchpad program and a seed fund to help third-party teams create a self-employed activity within the ecosystem.
Other investors in the round include CoinFund, Animoca Brands, Matt Bellamy, Muse's lead singer, June Fund, HOF Capital, John Pfeffer and GBIC. Existing investors, Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures, Angel Angel, the Digital Currency Group, William Mougayar, Hex Capital and Rising Tide Fund also participated in the financing.
To date, Dapper Labs has raised $ 27.8 million. Formed in February 2018, Dapper Labs was ousted by Axiom Zen to bring the benefits of decentralization to consumers.
