Dapper CEO Roham Gharegozlou confirmed and cited the partnership with Google in a tweet that covered some major milestones for the Flow blockchain since going on mainnet less than a year ago: over 2MM unique wallets, with less than half from Top Shot, nearly 250 mainnet contracts, and over 18MM blocks and nearly 50MM transactions on the chain.
Dapper’s Flow blockchain supports some of the most popular NFT collections on the market, including NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties. As of February of this year, NBA Top Shot had generated $ 230 million in sales. That figure almost tripled to $ 680 million, according to Forbes.
Recognizing the long-term potential of NFTs, NBA legends Michael Jordan and Kevin Durant joined other investors in supporting Dapper’s $ 305 million fundraising round earlier this year. At the time, the company had a valuation of $ 2.6 billion.
In less than a year, NFTs have grown from a dark corner of the crypto industry to a multi-billion dollar market. August was a record month for the NFT market, with 30-day sales eclipsing $ 2 billion, according to industry data.
On the corporate side, several NFT-focused companies closed major funding rounds this year. As Cointelegraph reported, NFT Recur recently closed a $ 50 million Series A backed by billionaire Steve Cohen’s family office, bringing its total valuation to $ 333 million.
GOOGLE AND FLOW
The partnership secures Google Cloud as a member of the Flow network that “will supercharge connectivity to consumers and app developers worldwide.” The multi-year deal, first reported in depth through a Forbes press release, establishes Google Cloud as a network operator that will provide the infrastructure necessary for Flow to scale up. Dapper Labs has established itself as a strong player across the NFT market, and the Flow blockchain is already powering Dapper products like Top Shot and CryptoKitties. The deal comes during the midst of an NFT boom, after a smashing month of August and more of a moderate September for the broader NFT market.
One interesting point of note from the team at Forbes’ is the impact that Flow and other blockchain services will have on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Node operators across the Flow blockchain are free to use any hardware that suits their needs. However, this week’s announcement will make it easier for devs to integrate with Google Cloud’s software.
Google isn’t known for being a primary leader in the next generation of Web 3.0, but perhaps news this week could spur change on that front. The tech giant announced a partnership with Top Shot and Flow blockchain creator Dapper Labs.
The deal will focus on supporting and scaling Dapper Lab’s in-house FLOW blockchain using Google Cloud’s network infrastructure. FLOW is already home to established NFT projects such as NBA Top Shot, which has recorded over $680 million in trading volume since it launched last October.
At the end of August, Dapper Labs had also partnered with Filecoin to create greater decentralization and asset integrity.
In this sense, the Flow blockchain was designed for broad scalability without the use of sharding techniques, to preserve the full power of composability, and provide fast, low-cost transactions.
A good structure, now alongside Filecoin, that lends itself well to dApps that aim to hit the larger mainstream audience, starting with the entertainment world such as music, sports, gaming, art, fashion and more.
Not only that, in its statement, the goal of this partnership would also be to promote the future of NFTs and metaverse gaming.
And speaking of the metaverse, in late August, John Hanke, CEO of Niantic and creator of Pokémon Go had shared his philosophical thoughts, saying that the “Metaverse is a dystopian nightmare”.
Dapper Labs, the Canadian startup behind Flow blockchain, became famous for being the developer of the $680 million NBA Top Shot marketplace. Not only that, the Flow network already supports dozens of applications including some of the most popular NFT collections such as CryptoKitties.
This summer alone, there have been between 500,000 and one million transactions per week on the platform. As such, this is a reason for the Google Cloud infrastructure to step in as a network operator to support the scaling of the Flow blockchain.
“It’s really about helping them with rapid and sustainable growth. Blockchain technology is becoming more and more mainstream. So companies like Dapper need scalable, secure infrastructure to grow their business, and even more importantly, support their networks”.
In a statement to Forbes, Gharegozlou described today’s blockchain evolution as “the iPhone moment where consumers are starting to understand what’s going on.” Both Microsoft and Amazon have begun blockchain initiatives in recent years. This has allowed the major tech players to continue to have a strong hold on cloud reliance with crypto nodes. A 2019 Chainstack report showed that over 60% of Ethereum nodes were running on cloud services. This, in turn, results in a steady reliance on major cloud services providers – a market generally controlled by Google, AWS, and Microsoft services.
The multi-year deal, first reported in depth through a Forbes press release, establishes Google Cloud as a network operator that will provide the infrastructure necessary for Flow to scale up. Dapper Labs has established itself as a strong player across the NFT market, and the Flow blockchain is already powering Dapper products like Top Shot and CryptoKitties. The deal comes during the midst of an NFT boom, after a smashing month of August and more of a moderate September for the broader NFT market.