Shortly
- Dapper Labs and Ultimate Fighting Championship will launch the NFT platform for UFC”>UFC Strike NFT collection platform on January 23rd.
- Meanwhile, the NFL All Day platform is scheduled to launch publicly by the end of the current NFL season.
After finding success with NBA-Top-Shot and inking subsequent trades with the NFL and League, Dapper Labs announced today that it will launch one NFT Platform for popular mixed martial arts organization Ultimate Fighting Championship later this week.
UFC Strike debuts Sunday, January 23, shortly after Saturday’s UFC 270 live pay-per-view event. Like Top Shot, UFC Strike digital collectibles are shaped by Dapper himself Flow Blockchain and revolves around video recordings from previous events. However, unlike Top Shot, the UFC collectible moments contain the original audio that goes with the video clip.
In addition, all packs – which contain a random selection of moments – are sold at the same price and not at different tiers (like NBA Top Shot). The first pack features NFT moments from fighters such as Francis Ngannou, Amanda Nunes, Kamaru Usman, Rose Namajunas, Derrick Lewis and Justin Gaethje.
Interestingly, Dapper’s contract with the UFC predates the start of NBA Top Shot. The bond was already announced in February 2020, when the NFT market was small and niche – long before it spread to some Trading volume worth $23 billion in 2021, according to data from DappRadar.
Caty Tedman, director of partnerships at Dapper Labs, narrates decrypt that Dapper wanted to start NBA Top Shot first and learn from the experience—including big scaling challenges Early last year – ahead of the launch of the UFC collectible.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we feel ready [launch],” She said. “We are very excited to offer UFC fans a unique experience and the value that comes with this type of product. As the industry grows and we grow, we are finally ready to bring this to market.”
Tedman said the UFC Strike platform will get a big boost at this weekend’s pay-per-view with UFC President Dana White and fighters attending the event.
Given that the UFC’s own schedule is largely based on pay-per-view fights happening roughly every couple of weeks, UFC Strike will plan its drops around those headlines. The platform will initially focus on fights from last year, but will eventually highlight top moments from older UFC fights as well. The first fight for promotion dates back to 1993.
Despite the nearly two-year lapse between the original announcement and this week’s rollout, Tedman said the UFC — which also has a crypto fanatic sign via the Socios.com platform – was striving to make a splash in the NFT space.
“Every organization has a different personality and the UFC really wants to test with us and try new things with us,” she said. “It’s great to have a partner who when launching a product doesn’t say, ‘Well, let’s take it small and see how it goes.’ It’s like, ‘Let’s make it as big as possible. Let’s make it UFC-sized.’”
UFC Strike is rolling out direct to the public and unlike Top Shot and the upcoming NFL All Day platform, it is not in closed beta. Tedman said Dapper is considering live activations at future UFC events, as it has done with the NBA, and is also looking for additional value for UFC NFTs — such as potential community or gaming aspects.
Top shot in 2022
Today’s UFC news follows yesterday’s launch of NBA Top Shot’s first major ad campaign, which stars Kevin Durant, the Brooklyn Nets star and two-time NBA champion.
Durant and his Boardroom media organization signed a partnership with Dapper Labs in October to give him “a starring role in NBA Top Shot,” the company said at the time. Durant who was a early investor in Coinbase and has also invested in other crypto startups, according to Tedman, knows the product Top Shot well.
“He’s a top athlete. He’s an elite man. He’s a tech investor,” she said. “He’s been with us for a long time. He’s been interested in the crypto community for a long time, so he just ticks all the boxes there. He’s got swagger too, right? There’s nothing about him that isn’t great to do this kind of campaign.”
For 2022, the NBA Top Shot team is “extremely focused on growing product participation and growing accessibility,” Tedman said. After the spike in demand in early 2021 and the time Dapper has spent working on platform stability and customer support, the company believes Top Shot still has significant growth potential ahead of it.
“We’re still in the early stages of this industry,” she said. “There is no such thing as ‘tried and true’. We’re going to try a lot of things, but we’re going to try a lot of things to make sure current collectors retain their value – so they don’t feel like we’re creating an experience that they don’t have value in anymore.”
And NFL All Day, what Dapper said Start through the end of the current NFL season, is still on the way – Super Bowl LVI is on February 13, for reference. The NFT platform is currently im Closed-Beta-Test, and given the relative newness of Dapper’s deal with the NFL, Tedman said they are focusing on the polish ahead of the public launch.
“Just like every organization has a different personality and every partnership has a different rhythm,” she said, “we’re a lot newer to the NFL. And we take our time with that.”
