Encrypted cats, star cards, they are the manufacturers of "sky-high price" NFT

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, Author: Deep Chain Liuliu, reproduced by Odaily with authorization.
"The first thing since the birth of human beings is collection." In December 2018, at the World TED Lecture Conference, Dapper Labs founder Roham Gharegozlou talked eloquently."From pebbles to shells to animal teeth, our ancestors never stopped collecting."At that time, Roham was full of ambition. The great success of CryptoKitties has made Roham Gharegozlou's name resound throughout the cryptocurrency field, and was even selected as one of the world's 40 blockchain figures under the age of 40 by Fortune magazine in 2018.From Encryption Kitties to Cheese Wizard, to the recently popular NBA TopShot, Roham is constantly updating the concept of "collection", and the Dapper Labs studio behind it has gradually become famous.And all of this comes from an early entrepreneurial dream of Roham.Roham and Dapper Labs have successively contributed to the industry a number of well-known projects such as Encryption Kitties, Cheese Wizard, Flow public chain and NBA TopShot...

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Hackathon ProsperityRoham was born in Iran in 1989, and then moved to Dubai, Paris and other places, and finally settled in California, USA.When he was a child, Roham had already shown a strong interest and talent for computers.When he was 9 years old, Roham tried to set up his first website in his life. Although the website did not attract more attention, it somehow pointed out the direction of life for the young Roham.After being admitted to Stanford University, Roham made an entrepreneurial attempt. Although he was unsuccessful, he set an ambition: to become the leader of a company.In 2012, Roham left the venture capital firm Newbury Ventures and founded Axiom Zen, the predecessor of Dapper Labs as we know it.At the beginning of Axiom Zen's establishment, the business scope did not include cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Until 2013, when computer engineer Dieter Shirley joined as CTO, the company began to slowly transform.At that time, Dieter Shirley was mining Bitcoin, which aroused Roham's curiosity. From then on, Roham began to understand the advantages of cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology behind them.In 2017, the cryptocurrency world staged the craziest moment in history - the ICO wave.At that time, countless people and teams poured into the cryptocurrency field, but most of the entrants just issued coins, pulled the market, and then cut it off.Roham did not follow the trend, but chose the Dapp, the decentralized application track, which was emerging at the time but had not yet exploded.To this end, Roham recruited his friend, Mik Naayem, who had worked in well-known game companies such as Sega and Bandai Namco, to help him.The two hit it off and started research on deploying smart contracts on the Ethereum network to develop applications.At this time, Mack Flavelle, the chief creative officer, proposed an idea for the team to be written into the history of cryptocurrency later - "crypto cat".As for why cats were chosen as the main characters of the game, Mack Flavelle once answered this way: "If you want to make products that interest consumers, then don't ask why cats are used, it is better to think about why cats are not used."CryptoKitties made its first public appearance at the ETHWaterloo Hackathon in Canada.At the competition site, Roham and his team members wore clothes with cats on them, promotional balloons with cats on them, and even gave each participant in the hackathon two encrypted cat cards.In the end, after fierce competition, Roham's team became one of the eight winning teams, and the sensational CryptoKitties wave began.

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Extraordinary ERC721Before reviewing and telling the story of CryptoKitties, there is one more important thing to understand—the ERC 721 standard, which is also the technical basis for the birth of CryptoKitties.Shortly after joining Axiom Zen in 2017, computer engineer Dieter Shirley made a key contribution to the team by publishing the first draft of the ERC 721 token.CryptoPunks has also explored non-homogeneous tokens before. It’s just that at that time, CryptoPunks was directly transformed on the basis of the ERC 20 standard.Perhaps seeing the hardships of developing NFT on ERC 20, Dieter Shirley chose to find another way.Later, a person named William Entriken discovered ERC 721 while working on a project and improved it. After that, with the joint efforts of other developers, the ERC 721 standard was officially widely recognized and accepted.Although William Entriken became the first author of this standard, Dieter Shirley, who is the second author, can be said to have contributed a lot.Different from ERC 20 standard tokens, ERC 20 tokens are homogeneous, and each token can be split to the 18th power of 10, which is an alternative asset.Each of the ERC 721 standard tokens is unique and indivisible, with an independent and unique Token ID.In fact, the concept of NFT runs through our daily life. Every leaf in the park, every pet in the pet shop, etc. is unique.This caught the attention of Roham and the team members.ERC 721 can realize the uniqueness of virtual assets, which means that many assets in the real world can find their own mapped digital assets in the blockchain world through this token standard.Roham also said in an interview that we realize that most assets in the real world are non-homogeneous, and they are unique, independent and private to their owners. Only money and some other commodities are homogeneous. Whether we talk about artwork, real estate, or in-game assets, everyone’s favorite is undoubtedly non-homogeneous assets.In Roham's view, the purpose of launching CryptoKitties is actually a demonstration of the concept of NFT, in order to prove that the blockchain can be applied outside the field of decentralized finance.By proposing the idea of ​​ERC 721, Roham and his team not only brought more possibilities for the development of NFT in the cryptocurrency industry, but also created the two most successful projects in the history of NFT.

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From CryptoKitties to Dapper LabsOn November 28, 2017, just as the price of Ethereum was about to hit the $500 mark, CryptoKitties was made public, which immediately caused a sensation in the cryptocurrency industry.After that, the price of Ethereum went on a rampage all the way, rising above $800. Among them, it cannot be said that there is no credit for CryptoKitties.Having said that, on December 2, 4 days after CryptoKitties went online, a cat sold for a sky-high price of 114,000 US dollars, worth more than 750,000 RMB.On December 3, the contract transaction volume of the two cryptokitties once accounted for 20% of the entire Ethereum network at that time, and even caused congestion on the Ethereum network.Within a week of its launch, the transaction volume of CryptoKitties exceeded 6 million US dollars, and the number of CryptoKitties sold on the open market has exceeded 100,000.In fact, the gameplay of the encrypted cat game is very simple. In this game, users only need two different cats to breed and give birth to new cats. These cats can continue to breed and can also be sold in the market.Since each new kitten carries 256 metagenomes from its parent cat, there are 4 billion possibilities for a kitten's appearance, personality and characteristics.Some of the rare cats mentioned above once sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even now, when CryptoKitties have died down, the most expensive one still sells for $170,000.Since its birth, CryptoKitties has been imitated and never surpassed. It is still an unattainable milestone in the history of blockchain applications.In the first two years, a total of more than 90,000 ETH addresses participated in the game, and more than 620,000 cat transactions were recorded on the chain.However, prosperity must decline, and after the popularity, there will be a cliff-like decline. From the data of DappTotal, it is not difficult to see that the popularity of CryptoKitties lasted only a few months before it died down.As the encryption kitties became colder, Roham and his team gradually fell silent.During this time, Roham did not sit idle, but set out to do three things.The first is to separate the blockchain business from Axiom Zen and establish Dapper Labs in the first quarter of 2018 in order to concentrate more on decentralized applications.Roham once said: The original intention of Dapper Labs was to achieve three goals: to introduce new users to cryptocurrency, to demonstrate new methods of decentralized thinking, and to keep users away from speculation.Secondly, Dapper Labs also launched its own wallet, Dapper wallet.In Roham’s opinion, in order for players to open Cryptokitties and other products more conveniently, it is necessary to find a way to make the interaction on the chain more concise.For Roham, the process of building a Dapper wallet on Ethereum taught him a lot. Perhaps simply being a wallet will not allow users to get a faster experience, and it is precisely because of this that Roham and his team have the idea of ​​​​creating the Flow public chain, and this is the third thing Roham does.Cryptokitties made Ethereum "lively" up, but at the same time exposed its scalability flaws. The rising transaction fee and the delayed confirmation of transactions on the chain due to network congestion often occur. These two problems both trouble the users and the development team.In an interview, Roham also made it clear: "One of the obvious mistakes we made was (misestimating) the throughput that the blockchain can support. We didn't expect that Ethereum would be able to play CryptoKitties because of only a few thousand people. lead to crashes. We also underestimated the difficulty of Solidity and the limitations of the EVM.”Therefore, the first problem to be solved by Flow is speed, throughput and cost, and the second problem to be solved is related to usability and user login. The Flow team has practical experience in operating phenomenal Dapps with tens of thousands of daily active users, so it has more say and experience in how blockchain applications can be upgraded to the Internet level, and blockchain games are a very good way to enter the mainstream crowd way of vision.Finally, after nearly two years of research and development, Dapper Labs launched its own Flow public chain in March last year.Back in May 2019, Dapper Labs at the time launched a new generation of decentralized game product "CheezeWizards" after completing the above three things.As soon as it was launched, Cheese Wizard gained the attention of the industry.Just like people's expectations for the new project launched by YFI founder AC, at that time, Dapper Labs was full of expectations for the second product of Dapper Labs because of the gems of CryptoKitties.After encountering the Cheese Wizard's Waterloo, Dapper Labs was silent again, but this time, Dapper Labs set its sights on the sports field.

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NBA TopShot goes viralAs early as July 2019, Dapper Labs had plans to release an NBA game on the Flow public chain.In August last year, Dapper Labs announced that its new decentralized game, NBA TopShot, had started its public beta.This basketball-themed NFT game can present every peak moment on the court in the form of a smooth small video package. In this game, users can exchange, collect and trade NFT cards of their favorite stars.In just half a year of the public beta, the total sales of NBA TopShot surpassed CryptoKitties, ranking first among NFT collectibles. At present, the total number of buyers of NBA TopShot has reached 20,596, the number of holders has reached 33,155, and the total historical sales have exceeded 44.7333 million US dollars. The sales price of NFT cards for NBA players has also repeatedly hit new highs.Among them, Lakers star LeBron James' dunk NFT in the 2019-2020 regular season game against the Rockets was sold for $75,000, but only two days later, this record was surpassed by Zion Williamson's $100,000 broke."I see an immeasurable future here." On January 25, facing the success of NBA TopShot, Roham said with emotion on Twitter.With the popularity of NBA TopShot, the tokens of its public chain Flow have also risen, from $1.39 on January 27 this year to a maximum of $12.12, an increase of 871%.It is worth noting that this game has not only received investment from Samsung, Andreessen Horowitz, USV, Coinbase Ventures and other investment institutions, but also received Andre Iguodala (Miami Heat), JaVale McGee (Cleveland Cavaliers), Spencer Dinwiddie (Brooklyn Nets), Garrett Temple (Chicago Bulls) and Aaron Gordon (Orlando Magic).In Roham's view, the success of NBA TopShot lies in absorbing all the advantages of the previous CryptoKitties and getting rid of the transaction restrictions of the Ethereum network.In addition, there are four reasons why NBA TopShot can quickly become popular.The first is the great fan potential contained in NBA stars themselves.The second is to solve the pain point of the physical card.In fact, before NBA TopShot, there have been physical collection cards for NBA stars, but compared with NFT cards, physical cards themselves have always had practical problems such as damage and loss.The NFT type of collection card can neither be lost nor damaged because it is stored on the chain, so it has also become one of the choices of the majority of collectors to a certain extent.Finally, NBA TopShot incorporates the most popular "blind box" gameplay.Blind boxes refer to toy boxes in which consumers cannot know the specific product style in advance, and have random attributes. Only when you open it will you know what you have drawn. Uncertain stimuli reinforce repetitive decision-making, so blind boxes become addictive for a while.Not long ago, Bubble Mart, a leading company in the field of blind boxes, gained a valuation of 100 billion when it went public, which shows the potential of blind boxes.NBA TopShot, which pinpointed the needs of fans, solved the pain points of physical cards, and added blind box gameplay, ushered in a good start, and also set a model for other decentralized application projects.For example, in December 2020, the NFT platform WAX announced a partnership with the game company CAPCOM to launch a "Street Fighter"-themed NFT digital trading card; and the recently released NFT project Hashmasks generated about $9 million in 4 days after its launch. Trading volume.The emergence of various NFT projects has also made the view that "NFT is about to become the next industry engine after liquidity mining" more and more popular.