Dapper

Back in March of this year, I wrote a post on the USV blog announcing our investment in Cryptokitties. 

A lot has happened since then. The company that made Cryptokitties is now called Dapper and it has raised a couple rounds of financing which will allow it to do a number of things:

• Continue to invest in Cryptokitties, which remains a vibrant game experience and is the world’s most used consumer blockchain application outside of exchanges, with 3.2-million transactions and tens of millions of dollars transacted on the platform
• Work with the world’s top entertainment brands to bring compelling brands, communities, and intellectual property to the blockchain. This means more game experiences, often in partnership with existing brands and game developers.
• Build out the infrastructure to make blockchain games, including cryptogoods (ie NFTs), accessible to a mainstream audience.

It has been exciting to watch a small team that built Cryptokitties at a hackathon turn into a large and growing blockchain gaming company with global ambitions and a number of important launches on the horizon.

As I wrote in the USV post in March, we believe that “digital collectibles and all of the games they enable will be one of the first, if not the first, big consumer use cases for blockchain technologies.”

A lot is happening behind the scenes at Dapper, and at a number of other blockchain gaming companies, and increasingly in the legacy gaming sector, to give me confidence that 2019 will be a breakout year for blockchain gaming and I believe that our portfolio company Dapper will be leading the way.