Dapper Labs, popularly known as the creator of NBA Top Shot NFTs, has now partnered with the US National Football League (NFL) to launch a marketplace that will offer American football-themed digital collectibles, Sports Business Journal reported on Tuesday.
According to the partnership deal, the NFL and the NFL Players Association would acquire equity in Dapper Labs. Citing anonymous sources, SBJ reported that the NFT marketplace would likely launch in January 2022.
The NFL Dapper Labs deal would be similar to that of its NBA Top Shot NFT marketplace that allows users to buy and sell trading card-like NFTs of NFL sports highlights.
NBA Top Shot has seen trade of $780 million worth of collector’s items to date.
The new marketplace would be built on Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain, an NFT focused blockchain.
Before NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs was famous for Ethereum-based digital collectibles CryptoKitties, the first major NFT project to exist.
Dapper Labs recently concluded a $250 million funding round on September 22, reaching a valuation of $ 7.6 billion. It had previously raised $305 million in March of this year.
In a conversation with crypto news media Decrypt in March, Caty Tedman, Dapper Labs head of partnerships, remarked:
“When I think about the NBA vs the NFL, the NBA really blaze a trail in a lot of ways, and they’re willing to take some risks. If you think about the NFL, they don’t always do it first, but they try to do it best. So learning from the NBA is very much in their playbook.
When we think about the kind of products that we would build with other partners, we think about customizing it for those fan bases. We can’t just slap NFL players on NBA Top Shot and make it work.”
