Crypto gaming giant Dapper Labs takes its next hit with Genies NFT ‘the Warehouse’ platform – TechCrunch

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As they near the end of a successful year for NFTs that recorded over $ 10 billion in transaction volume, today’s NFT project developers find themselves in a bind – that whether it is to chase the dollars of today or the users of tomorrow.

Dapper Labs, creator of one of the most popular NFT hits of the year, NBA Top Shot, seeks to convince investors that he can convince developers to bet on it. Today, the recently valued $ 7.6 billion startup is showcasing some of the fruits of that lawsuit, launching the product of its partnership with startup avatars-for-the-stars Genies – an ambitious NFT showcase startups are hoping for. serve as a hub for Web3 Digital Identity allowing users to create animated avatars and equip them with crypto props.

The new platform, called The Warehouse, is launched today to a small network of invite-only users before gradually expanding to a larger audience in the coming months, the two startups told TechCrunch.

The new platform will allow users to outfit the 3D cartoon avatars they create in the Genies app with masks, shoes, backpacks and other digital props created on Dapper’s blockchain network called Flow. Genies tells us that the majority of items in the store will be sold for less than $ 20, although this is notably only for primary sales, the owners of those products will decide the market for secondary sales of individual items. The warehouse in particular won’t have its aftermarket activated at launch, an effort the Genies team hopes to give the community some time to focus on rather than resale values.

Image: Geniuses

Genies has notably already experimented with selling digital clothing and accessories in its native mobile app, although this company does not include anything related to blockchain or NFT. Genies’ foray into the NFT economy is a gamble on Dapper’s particular blockchain brand, a brand that may be less decentralized than networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum, but which offers a number of benefits for users, These include lower fees, higher transaction capacity, and a developer-friendly platform for Web3 “luxuries” like processing credit cards and forgetting users’ passwords.

Flow is certainly not the only bet on a more user-friendly blockchain with lower fees and more user-friendly integration, although Dapper has raised some $ 600 million from investors on the promise of his future success. Competing Layer 1 chains like Wax and Solana have seen more action from native NFT projects in recent months as developers aim to harness the strengths of the platform and coin holder wallets. Venture capitalists have also created several new crypto unicorns this year that aim to evolve the Ethereum blockchain with ‘rollup’ products that allow developers to leverage network security while processing and aggregating transactions. on a secondary chain.

NBA Top Shot’s meteoric rise earlier this year drew a lot of attention to Dapper, who saw monthly trading volume drop from less than $ 1 million in December 2020 to nearly $ 225 million in February. 2021. Today, Top Shot’s network of buyers and transactions is well below these. of its most notable competitor Axie Infinity which had more than 520,000 unique buyers in November against 64,000 for Top Shot according to the crypto analysis site CryptoSlam. While the wider NFT market has exploded in value since Top Shot started the party, the vast majority of new high traffic projects have embraced Ethereum, with the aim of exploiting the hundreds of billions of liquid crypto wealth flowing through. through this network.

Image: Geniuses

The launch of The Warehouse is a particularly important time for Dapper, as he turns to the developers of the backyard and ignites again while learning from his mistakes with Top Shot, who struggled from the start to keep up with a increasingly large audience and frustrated some early adopters. who saw their NFTs drop in value as Dapper continued to post more and more NFT Moments.

“The Genies Warehouse is the biggest release on Flow since NBA Top Shot and we look forward to similar success,” said Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs, in a statement.

While Genies is far from a household name today, the startup’s top partners most certainly are. For years, avatar startups have popped up in hopes of capturing a piece of the “digital identity” pie, but game makers haven’t been interested in adopting third-party systems and celebrities have been too busy dissecting the influence of social media to bother thinking about virtual worlds.

Genies has been more successful than any startup in recent memory at building a network of celebrity partnerships for a product that has a decidedly niche vision for the future of the web, albeit increasingly shared by investors as the startup has adopted more fervently the NFTs publicly. This year. Last week, Genies announced a partnership with Universal Music Group to host avatars and digital products for the group’s artist roster. Genies has already forged partnerships with the who’s who of artists, including figures like Justin Bieber, J Balvin and Cardi B.

In May, Genies got approval from Mary Meeker’s venture capital fund, Bond, which funded the startup’s $ 65 million Series B.

Although NFTs have enjoyed a favorable climate from the tech industry and the venture capitalist class, there seems to be plenty of evidence that consumers are still skeptical about the price of items. digital devices that look the same as the ones they’ve bought in games for years. to revolutionize their online experience.

Last month, the Discord chat app found itself at the mercy of a wide backlash from users after CEO Jason Citron tweeted a screenshot of an integration with the NFT MetaMask wallet platform. . After thousands of responses poured in, many of which were critical, Citron continued with a tweet clarifying that it was simply an “internal concept” that the company had “no current delivery plan” and that “Web3 has a lot of good things but also a lot of problems that we need to solve on our own scale.

Dapper and Genies both aim to reduce some of the baggage of the NFT industry with the debut of The Warehouse.

“This is not a 10K avatar profile photo project or we bring culture to NFTs and crypto,” notes Genies CEO Akash Nigam. “We see this as the first step in creating a digital identity through the consumer metaverse and plan to empower the wearable creative tools to consumers and talent on the go.”

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