Dapper Labs
Developers Helping Developers
Dapper Labs is a leader in creating blockchain technologies and applications that people love using. Their team defined the standard for digital collectibles by creating the ERC 721 token, which was the origin of one of the blockchain’s most important uses, non-fungible tokens (NFTs). They built CryptoKitties, an NFT marketplace and game, that was one of the first heavily used blockchain applications and paved the way for success for today’s wildly popular NFT projects. Recently, they created their own blockchain, Flow, to address blockchain scaling issues that prevented mass market adoption of NFTs. Given Dapper’s blockchain bona fides and technical capabilities, Flow became the go-to platform for brands to launch their own NFT projects. For example, NBA TopShots, the first major project on Dapper’s blockchain, has millions of users and generated over $1 billion in transactions.
We were thrilled to work with Dapper Labs’ Flow developer experience team to help improve their developer ecosystem and increase the adoption of the Flow blockchain with NFT builders. The Tanooki Labs team leveraged our expertise designing and building in web2 and web3 to create some key components of the Flow developer ecosystem.
Kitty Items
The Dapper Labs team wanted to create a compelling reference application exemplifying the best practices for development and user experience so that new blockchain developers could quickly create their own NFT projects and marketplaces on Flow.
Drawing inspiration from CryptoKitties and NBA TopShots, we led the Dapper Labs team during our Sprint Zero process to design a world-class marketplace experience that leveraged the Flow blockchain’s latest innovations. Then, Tanooki’s developers collaborated with Dapper’s expert blockchain developers to implement and deploy the project to the Flow testnet. KittyItems is now the de-facto reference for all new Flow developers.
Developer Wallet
Being developers ourselves, we understand how important good development tools are for efficiently building outstanding applications. This is why the Dapper team asked us to help redesign the development wallet used by all Flow developers.
We began with our Sprint Zero process to define the ideal developer workflow and designed an easy-to-use wallet that was simple, but provided all the nitty-gritty details a developer needs to debug their code. We then worked with the Dapper team to develop the new wallet and integrate it into their suite of developer tools.
Testnet Faucet
A critical step in launching any blockchain application is thoroughly testing it on a testnet before deploying smart contracts to the production mainnet. This QA needs to be as realistic as possible, which means submitting real blockchain transactions and requires having some of a blockchain’s native cryptocurrency; in Dapper’s case, the FLOW token. This is traditionally done by requesting that FLOW be sent to a wallet using a testnet faucet. This means creating a great and understandable experience for teams to get FLOW tokens to use in testing is a vital part of onboarding developers into the Flow ecosystem.
Once again, the Tanooki and Dapper teams collaborated closely during Sprint Zero and development phases to understand the specific needs of teams testing their Flow-based applications and creating the easiest-to-use testnet faucet for any blockchain.
