Today the London-based startup Fantastec announced that it is partnering with Dapper Labs, creators of NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties, to shift its “SWAP” NFT collectibles platform from a private blockchain to the public Flow blockchain later this summer. SWAP boasts some of the biggest names in European football, with Arsenal, Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund signed up.
To date, the Fantastec SWAP app enabled users to purchase NFTs and didn’t provide an in-app secondary market. That peer-to-peer marketplace will be added with the move to Flow blockchain.
Flow is a next-gen open source blockchain that offers scalability, cost efficiency and environmentally sustainable features. It is home to Dapper’s NBA Top Shot, in which P2P trading accounted for the majority of the $600 million total Top Shot sales, per CryptoSlam.
“This is a significant upgrade for our worldwide SWAP fan community”, said the Fantastec co-founder Simon Woollard. “Now our SWAP fans have the option to sell these highly prized NFTs via the Flow secondary market”.
Arguably NBA TopShot was one of the triggers in this year’s NFT push into the mainstream. A key feature was to target mainstream users rather than the cryptocurrency crowd, and it’s that broad fanbase that has always been Fantastec’s target.
Today’s announcement follows swiftly from the kickoff of the 2021 Euros last week, promising an opportune summer for football fans and NFT users alike.
Fantastec began minting NFTs in 2018, being one of the first startups to sign blockchain licensing agreements with the major European football clubs. However, it now faces stiff competition from the likes of French blockchain startup SoRare, which also signed an NFT deal with Real Madrid earlier this year.
With deep pockets after raising more than $300 million, Dapper Labs is making a dent in Ethereum’s NFT market share. But there has been a response. ConsenSys is launching Palm, which processes NFTs on a side chain linked to the Ethereum mainnet. This aims to tackle the high transaction costs and ESG issues currently faced by Ethereum NFTs.
