CryptoKitties Creator Debuts NBA Game on Its Own Blockchain

Blockchain meets basketball in the newest game from the developers of CryptoKitties.

Dapper Labs' NBA Top Shot has launched into private beta following the game's initial product announcement in July 2019.

The game is looking to fill a product niche by combining manager-style sports games with digitally scarce goods called non-fungible tokens.

"Fans can own a piece of the action and they can participate in this economy of basketball, which has never really happened before," Dapper Labs VP of Partnerships Caty Tedman said in a phone interview.

NBA Top Shot is also the first Dapper Labs game built on top of the team's new custom blockchain, Flow.Tedman said the new chain gives the game higher throughput and consistency, a valuable product given Dapper Labs product history.

In essence, Top Shot combines digital trading-card games with apps like Tap Baseball.

"The main premise of the mobile game is a manager-style game where you're kind of creating the strongest team you can," Tedman said.

To begin with, the mobile game is free while NFTs are an add-on, a similar method debuted by crypto game MLB Champions this spring.

Not only that, but Dapper reached an agreement with the NBA and the National Basketball Players Association to use the likenesses of basketball's greatest stars from the league's 50-plus-year history: think Magic Johnson on the blockchain.

"We're lucky that we tied the product to a moment in time rather than the live game because we can continue going backward [in time]," Tedman said.