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Dapper Labs: the story behind the crypto cat and the killer mace of the new project Flow

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Cryptocat shows the imagination space of Dapp and the charm of NFT. The team behind it, Dapper Labs, has developed Flow Commons to solve congestion and lower the usage threshold.

Original title: [swastika interview] reveals the story behind crypto and the killer mace of Flow
The original source: DappReview

Takeaway:Speaking of "cryptocat", the name is well-known in blockchain circles. The game, which blocked ethereum as soon as it was launched at the end of the 17th year, has demonstrated the imagination space of Dapp and the charm of NFT. Over the past two years, there has been a steady stream of news about cheese wizard, Dapper Wallet, partnerships with the NBA and UFC, huge financing, and Flow. As the team behind Dapper Labs, what exactly do they want to do? What is the logic behind this sequence of operations? This time interviewed Dapper DappReview Labs, founder and CEO Roham Gharegozlou, nearly word interview through this article, we gleaned a can.

Below is DappReview CEO Vincent and Dapper Labs CEO Roham interview full text, translate and edit by DappReview finishing.

Vincent: let's start with CryptoKitties. In late 2017, cryptocat went viral around the world, attracting millions of players to collect, breed and trade the cute kittens, becoming the first phenomenon-level dapp. My friends and I spent a lot of time studying their DNA data to figure out how to make expensive kittens. We found some ground rules, and we succeeded in breeding Santa kittens, selling them and earning some ETH. "Cryptocat" was successful not just because of the cute kittens, but actually because it was the first time the NFT concept, or erc-721 token, had been made public. So what's the story behind crypto and erc-721? How did you come up with this idea and make it happen?

Roham: erc-721 is an NFT standard. Our CTO Dieter Shirley proposed this standard even before we started doing CryptoKitties. We realize that most real-world assets are non-homogeneous: they are unique, independent, and private to their owners. Only money and some other goods are homogenized.Whether we're talking about art, real estate, or in-game assets, there's no doubt that the most popular are non-homogeneous assets.

The purpose of making CryptoKitties is to demonstrate NFT and prove that blockchain can be applied outside the decentralized financial field. We believe in the future of DeFi, but we also want to show that cryptotokens have more practical USES than speculation and finance. It turned out that we were right. People from all walks of life were attracted by CryptoKitties and quickly learned about the value of blockchain for the experience: your assets that will always be your own, the scarcity of digital assets, and the global circulation trading market.

The first person to come up with the blockchain cat concept was our chief creative officer Mack Flavelle: we know that cats rule the Internet, so it makes sense to say that they will eventually break into the blockchain. Throughout the summer of 2017, we had only a small team to shape the prototype of smart contracts for CryptoKitties. We launched the initial prototype at the EthGlobal Event in Waterloo, which caused quite a stir, allowing us to recruit dozens of people to the team almost overnight and complete most of the graphics and UI design in less than a month.

It's worth noting that CryptoKitties' original idea came from Axiom Zen, an award-winning startup studio that my brother Sam and I founded in 2012. That's why we were able to scale the team up quickly.

Vincent: so why was the team spun off from Axiom Zen?

Roham: the successful "experiments" of CryptoKitties and NFT have had an exciting impact on the cryptocurrency community, as well as the mainstream gaming, music and art communities, and we are deeply impressed by the expectations of mainstream users and entrepreneurs for this unique experience. Poor user experience design directly costs us users: it's because the infrastructure is not ready to enter the mainstream user market. As a result,We decided to focus most of our teams' future efforts on developing blockchain infrastructure and killer app development and commercialization.With nearly 100 full-time employees, we may be a small company in China, but we are one of the largest and most dedicated independent teams in the world outside of China to study the blockchain development platform and dApp.

Our new company, Dapper Labs, raised money from the best investors in the world and started building our own blockchain infrastructure in 2018.

Our plan is to start with the user experience that we want to get to, and go our way with the technology until it meets our needs. Two years later, we're launching Flow, which we believe will be a game changer for cryptographic applications.

Vincent: when you launched CryptoKitties, did you think the game would reach such a scale and attract hundreds of thousands of people and breed millions of kittens? Or did you just think it was a good idea to try?

We've been following the development of the game very closely, so we knew from our first internal demo that we had created something really cool. We put a lot of effort into the initial release at EthWaterloo and it all paid off: the community clearly loved the game and gave us a lot of good feedback, which gave us a lot of confidence that the game would be successful.

To be honest, we didn't expect that CryptoKitties would become the best-known brand in the cryptography field after bitcoin. We knew we would attract a lot of older players in the CryptoKitties space, but we were surprised by the extent to which CryptoKitties resonated with people in all walks of life.We've been able to educate a wide range of people (and large vendors) about cryptography and get them interested in decentralization, even if they're not interested in the impact of cryptocurrencies on the financial world.

We are grateful and happy for the fans' love. We have a responsibility to bring this brand into the mainstream. And in Flow, CryptoKitties will show its full potential (yes, our CryptoKitties will come back to you with a brand new experience in the near future).

Vincent: one year after CryptoKitties went live, you introduced us to Dapper Labs in a Medium article. We've heard a lot of good news this year, including $12 million in financing led by a16z and USV, and the kittyVerse project. What else are you doing? How did you position the CryptoKitties project when discussing other long-term projects within the company?

Roham: we started work on Flow very early.

CryptoKitties was launched in December 2017. We realized a few weeks later that ethereum's limitations prevented us from building a stable business model through CryptoKitties. We also know that failure in other chains is an existential risk for us.

That's why we turned CryptoKitties into an independent company called Dapper Labs and got financing from USV and a16z. Dapper Labs was announced in March 2018, although it wasn't called that at the time.

Within a few months, we understood Flow's core job: separating consensus from computation. Two months after setting up Dapper Labs, we applied for a provisional patent in May 2018. We then spent a year verifying our initial understanding with our academic research advisor (who is also my advisor at Stanford university) and completing the structure construction related to the blockchain concept.

During that time, we experimented constantly with ethereum to test and learn with real players. We kept CryptoKitties alive by focusing on small communities of niche but real players and fans, rather than speculators. Since its launch, CryptoKitties' smart contracts have been the most active on ethereum each year. In 2019, we executed over 2 million on-chain transactions, more than any other c-end Dapp.

We also launched the first c-end smart contract wallet, Dapper wallet, in early 2019, allowing users to hold assets and trade them in cryptocurrency without fear of losing a mnemonic or private key. Dapper wallet has more than 25,000 users on Android and Chrome. This is also a test and verification of our user experience.

The most important thing is, we and the world's most important several well-known brand in-depth discussion, on how to make and chain block encryption technology in product experience, and put them in the hundreds of millions of fans brought into this world, we have a more profound understanding and better than anyone more tangible projects in terms of technology, and some of the best team in the field of encryption, we understand the need for developers, to ensure that the Flow is for each person () is not only our development platform. Famous brands have been announced including NBA, UFC and warner music.

Vincent: throughout 2018, many projects have tried to replicate the success of CryptoKitties, and most of them are essentially ponzi schemes, like, I think, the crypto countries, the crypto celebrities and so on. You buy a worthless NFT and sell it for a profit at a higher price. Uniqueness, true ownership, and transparency exaggerate the value of the assets in the chain. As the team and early adopters who drafted the erc-721 standard, you certainly have a better understanding of the nature of blockchain assets than most. So how do you see the development of NFT in areas like games, art, etc. And have your ideas changed in the past, especially in the last 2 years?

Roham: first, I must agree with you that after CryptoKitties, many "fast-track" projects are only undermining the value of blockchain. Their products were simple, their consumers were smart, and they quickly learned from real players that these were scams. Unfortunately, CryptoKitties also proved to the world that ETH's scalability is extremely limited, which has scared off many big manufacturers who are seriously looking to make a mark in the blockchain sector.

Games and exchanges continue to dominate the ETH, but their success is limited by scalability and high transaction costs. The ETH has an amazing fan community that has impressed us, and some indie teams have created some sticky products. More recently, for example, projects like Avastars have set new standards for the effectiveness of data on the NFT's chain, and artists like Josie Bellini have also surprised collectors.

The future of NFT should not be a niche, difficult-to-use user experience, but like the most advanced games and apps consumers use today. We believe NFT will eventually be combined with social products such as Twitter and douyin, or with decentralized versions of them.

For art, games, and collectibles to succeed in the long run, you need a platform that is low cost, low latency, high throughput, and development friendly, which is what we created Flow for. Consumers expect a high-quality user experience and low volatility prices so they can introduce these products to their friends. When something works for consumers, it quickly attracts millions of users.

Vincent: in May 2019, you released Dapper wallet and a new game, CheezeWizards. To many, it came as a surprise that Dapper Labs was starting to develop infrastructure products like encrypted wallets, not just apps. But if we go back to the first time you introduced Dapper Labs, you mentioned that one of your goals was to "accelerate the development of infrastructure and tools to help more participants join the ecosystem." Wallets clearly play a role. And Dapper wallet offers a completely different experience for users to interact with and manage their accounts on the blockchain. What's the story behind this design? And what are your plans for the future of Dapper wallet? How will it apply to the Flow economy?

Roham: we had to develop Dapper wallet on ETH. We hope that it will be easier for players to open CryptoKitties and our other products. From clearer guidance to paying users for gas, we've been trying to find ways to make it easier to interact on the chain. We also learned a lot by building the Dapper wallet on ethereum. These lessons will play an important role in how users participate in the Flow experience. Usually, we learn in development. We don't like theories. We like to experiment in real life. Dapper wallet is both good for consumers and good for us to learn from. Thanks to Dapper, all applications can be launched easily on Flow. To succeed, Dapp must make mainstream consumers feel safe and familiar, while still offering decentralized benefits.

That being said, Dapper Labs has always had the DNA to develop infrastructural types of products: products we've launched, such as ZenHub (one of the most popular developer collaboration solutions in the world) and Routific, the leading routing API platform. Another Dapper Labs co-founder, Mik Naayem, is the former founder and CEO of Fuel Powered, a real-time mobile gaming platform that grew to 225 million users before he quit in 2016. Dapper Labs' engineering team also has experience developing blockchain projects such as bitcoin, ETH, R3 Corda and Quantstamp, as well as building mission-critical infrastructures for companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Akamai.

Vincent: about the CheezeWizards, what was the original reason for developing this game? To me, it's more of a social experiment than a real game. To be honest, user engagement is much lower than CryptoKitties. Did the CheezeWizards live up to your expectations?

Roham: we like to learn by doing, so when we wanted to try a new game that was different from CryptoKitties, we started doing it. We want to continue to develop products that make great artistic sense and keep players entertained. We think we did it. We love wizard culture. Whenever we went to an event, people would ask us what the Cheeze Wizards were going to do next. The players involved in the game are actually extremely active.

We also wanted to make a great PvP tournament game, but that was more difficult. Cheeze Wizards pushed ethereum to its limits in a different way than CryptoKitties: the smart contract capacity ended up being only 20 bytes less than the EVM (ethereum virtual machine) limit. Due to scalability and latency issues, we had to set specific times for tournament matches, which made it difficult for people to play across time zones. This was an important lesson, and we learned that our players are all over the world, and we now know more about how to build great experiences in different time zones.

Vincent: next, in the two games CryptoKitties and CheezeWizard created by Dapper Labs, what proved to be right and what proved to be wrong? (it could also be some of the assumptions or expectations you had when you created the game)

Roham: we thought from the beginning that people would want to play blockchain games, and that proved to be true. They value the benefits of cryptography, even if they are not big fans of cryptocurrencies. We also proved that people are willing to pay extra to "have their fun." True ownership changes the way people view their investment in fun and enhances their emotional connection to the game.

Users spend 10-100 times more on NFT assets than they do on ordinary digital assets, because NFT guarantees authenticity, scarcity and true ownership, which in turn indicates that NFT assets are tradable. As an owner, I can sell my assets at any time I choose. Even without adding in revenue from generation 0 cat sales, CryptoKitties' ARPDAU is $2 - $3 (over $13 during generation 0 cat sales), while most mobile games are $0.05 - $0.40.

Blockchain games also have an amazing lifespan. For example, CryptoKitties on the ETH was originally designed as a one-year experience: we introduced new genes into the sale of generation 0 cats, and the last batch was sold in December 2018. Even so, CryptoKitties remains one of the largest brands and communities in the blockchain world, with more than 2 million transactions in 2019 alone, with the average spending per paying user approaching $200.

Vincent: that's true. I remember that according to our figures, the average blockchain player in a card game like GodsUnchained pays $300, and I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on many blockchain games myself. These are indeed verified, so what logic is falsified? Or what are the lessons?

Roham: one obvious mistake we made was how much throughput the blockchain could support. We didn't expect ethereum to collapse because just a few thousand people were playing CryptoKitties. We also underestimated the difficulty of solbriefing and the limitations of EVM: early on, we tried to maintain as much compatibility as possible before deciding to proceed with a new approach.

On the CheezeWizard, we also made a mistake of not building any kind of contract upgrade capability. The community found some bugs that could be easily fixed if we could upgrade our contract. Instead, we had to solve the problem in more complex ways, which greatly increased our team's workload (many emergency meetings and all-nighters).

Vincent: now let's move on to the most exciting part -- Flow, the blockchain project you're building. I don't want to get into the technical details here. Flow's website has three very detailed technical papers that discuss the core architecture, such as split consensus and block composition. I'm more interested in when and how the Flow protocol idea came about.

Roham: due to the network congestion caused by us, Flow was almost born at the same time as CryptoKitties. If a few thousand users can cripple our app's network, we can't afford to ignore the platform risk.

Within a week or two of launching CryptoKitties, we knew we needed to find a solution to the scalability and availability issues. We did in-depth research on dozens of blockchains, met with top teams in the field, and came to the conclusion that we needed our own platform.

Our primary concern is that decomposing network execution state (through sharding, tier 2 solutions, or side chains) can significantly increase the burden on developers. In addition, we recognize that a number of key improvements need to be made at the protocol level, including resource-oriented programming, or human-readable security.

Vincent: so you guys had this idea after discovering the CryptoKitties problem with ethereum congestion. So how did the back land?

Roham: two months after creating the Dapper lab, we filed a provisional patent in May 2018. We then spent a year verifying our initial understanding with our consultants and completing the construction of the blockchain concept. What I want to make clear is that we share the patent promise of companies like Red Hat and Tesla: intellectual property is free and open source.

After finalizing the core architecture, we built the remaining Flow blockchain and related tools, working closely with the most thoughtful people in the encryption industry and the most experienced developers from the gaming, entertainment, and technology sectors. As a result, we believe our approach can make encryption mainstream -- and feedback from our development partners has confirmed this. We want Flow to meet everyone's needs, not just our own.

Since two years ago we set out to study the Flow, most of our intuitive thoughts have been fully validated: published by our test network development and research, effectiveness has been effectively illustrate our architecture, at the same time, Libra for the selection of resource oriented programming stressed the importance of developing intelligent contract by this method.

Vincent: according to our data, even the most popular game or DeFi project has only 2-3 thousand active days. What do you think should be done to increase the number of users of blockchain applications? And how do Dapper Labs and Flow position themselves?

Roham: the process to reach a mass audience is currently shorter than expected: consumer behavior changes quickly, and once the right platform exists, millions of developers will join the race.

Current Dapp, game, and DeFi projects are limited by scalability and availability. Few teams solve usability problems because they know they cannot generate the scale needed to build a long-term stable business. At the same time, most extensibility teams don't pay enough attention to the user or developer experience.

The road to mainstream blockchain will be blazed by a team brave enough to start with the customer experience and study the technology as deeply as possible. That's what we do at Dapper Labs. We'll be working on killer apps for the next three months. Developers can already test the platform on Playground as part of our private Alpha testing project.

Vincent: I just tested Playground last week, and it seems that I can get used to it quickly. I deployed an NFT contract with the template provided, which is very interesting. So what is the core problem to be solved by Flow?

Roham: the first issues that Flow addresses are speed, throughput, and cost. There are 1.6 billion NBA fans in the world. If CryptoKitties blocked the ETH, imagine what would happen to NBA fans. Flow was built to support the scale that the community should have.

The second (and arguably more important) issue to be addressed by Flow relates to availability and user login. Mainstream consumers are obsessed with tradable digital assets, but they will be deterred by cumbersome wallets and chrome plug-ins. They never get to the next level. In the early CryptoKitties, we found that 99% of people who reached the MetaMask step stopped there. More accessible blockchain games are needed to achieve large-scale applications.

Vincent: last year, Dapper Labs and the NBA teamed up to announce the development of the NBA Top Shot. A few weeks ago, Dapper Labs partnered with UFC to help create UFC branded digital collectibles. NBA and UFC are the most prestigious entertainment IP in the world. It's great to get them into the world of encryption and bring fans a whole new experience with blockchain technology. Will the two products use the features and technologies of Flow blockchain? If so, how is it applied?

Roham: we're excited to show sports fans what encryption is possible. The products for NBA and UFC fans will be very different because the two sports are very different. We will create meaningful experiences for each community, all based on the same fundamental cryptographic values: true ownership, mobile markets, and open developer platforms.

Flow makes such a project possible because of its speed, scalability, and low cost, as well as its user-friendliness when used and logged in. Legal currency channel makes it easy for users to get started, and money makes users leave with real benefits. Once sports fans get a taste of encryption, we think they'll like it.

In short, encrypted networks run peer-to-peer software driven by community groups. That's why we go after some of the biggest and fastest-growing sports in the world. That's why our other verticals are games and music.

Our partnership with warner music group is not only an investment, but also a way to seek a deeper connection between artists and fans. We like the concept of connecting digital experiences to real-world rewards that we're discussing right now. We hope that one day, people will be able to meet their favorite band through digital shopping!

Vincent: as an outsider, I saw a Dapper Labs to do a lot of things, such as CryptoKitties and CheezeWizard native block chain game, Dapper Wallets, framework agreement, the basis of the Flow and IP with famous products. How big is the team? How do you make decisions before launching each product line? Ultimately, how will all the interesting things you're building work together as an ecosystem?

Roham: we have nearly 100 full-time employees and some excellent freelancers and consultants who can help refine our expertise.

Our team is divided into small groups that can quickly prototype. These small teams allow us to quickly try new things and then expand on good ideas.

We almost always start with the big idea: what is interesting? What will push the boundaries of possibility? How can we bring blockchain to people who have never experienced its benefits? We have some people doing market research to see if there is a market for these ideas. We worked as fast as possible and Shared information from all the tests so that everyone on the team could learn.

A core group has been working on the CryptoKitties project. Another fast-growing team focuses on Flow and NBA top shot. Some of us just make prototypes and ideas.

We also have strong partners in the ecosystem. Other companies such as Opensea, Alchemy, and BlockDaemon have been deeply involved, providing us with valuable feedback on projects such as Flow, and will build some of the earliest tools for the platform. We look forward to expanding the network of partners and seeing what experienced developers can bring to Flow.

Vincent: thanks to Roham, the answers above are excellent, and I know a lot of background and stories that I didn't know before. Then, the last question is, how is the use of Flow Playground after it comes online? And when will NBA Topshot be unveiled to players that many people care about?

Roham: thanks to Vincent for his support of Dapper Labs. From your question, I can deeply understand the understanding and expectation of you and your team in this field. Hopefully our Flow and NBA TopShot games will surprise the whole cryptocurrency community. The results of Flow Playground are still very exciting. In the 10 days after the launch, nearly 400 developers have completed the tutorials on Playground and created more than 500 experimental projects. A bigger announcement is coming soon that Flow's unique editing language, Cadance, will be integrated with a world-class project. Applications developed on flows are likely to be widely distributed and exposed.

I've heard that my friends in China have started to live and work again, but in North America, the effects of the virus are just beginning. As you may have heard, the NBA has delayed the season, and several NBA players are infected. But our NBA game will be released on time, and fans need other ways to enjoy their favorite games and interact with their idols. Not only will we be able to use the latest videos from the new season, but we will also be able to turn the best videos from previous seasons into a collectible NFT. Games and videos are their biggest entertainment when people can't go out. We believe this challenge is an opportunity for us and we look forward to bringing an interesting and new experience to NBA fans around the world. I hope you'll come and play TopShot more often.

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