The Team Behind CryptoKitties Is One Step Closer to Leaving Ethereum

Dapper Labs product lead Kim Cope speaks at Consensus 2019.One of Ethereum's early stars is pinning its future hopes to a blockchain of its own making.

Dapper Labs, the startup that raised roughly $39 million from venture capitalists after its brief success with the CryptoKitties collectibles game in late 2017, launched a simulator Thursday for its upcoming Flow blockchain.

The move positions Dapper Labs among a number of startups looking to build protocols that will unseat Ethereum as the blockchain of choice for a variety of applications.

Shirley said Ethereum's forthcoming sharding approach in Eth 2.0 would "Really limit what you can do with smart contracts" and his team wanted to use a more "Consumer-oriented" platform that can handle gaming volume without clogging the network, as CryptoKitties once did to the ethereum blockchain.

"Blockchains have their own revenue stream as a part of them, from selling tokens," Shirley said, adding that tokens won't be sold to the public until it is legally "Prudent" to do so.

"If Ethereum is blockchain 2.0, then we view Flow as version 4.0. We view Flow as the blockchain technology for the mass market," Purdue University researcher David Broecker said in explaining why his team will eventually run a Flow node.

Inventing a new programming language and a new blockchain structure to boot, as Dapper Labs is doing, is notoriously fraught.

"Developing their own in-house blockchain solution would allow WMG to have more control of the blockchain from a multitude of directions including information and security," Zimmerman.

For now, Dapper Labs' Shirley said his team is focused on attracting developers and prospective stakeholders to its nascent blockchain.

"At launch, the people running nodes will probably be our investors and our partners, people we know. But the architecture design of the blockchain doesn't depend on a small number of known participants for security. It can scale to thousands of participants that are anonymous," Shirley said.