FinTech news in Dapper Labs category

a16z wrote its largest individual check ever, at $350 million, to Flow, Neumann new residential real estate company focused on rentals, the New York Times reported today.

The fund, which is backed by Dapper’s venture arm and Dapper investors Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, Union Square Ventures, Coinfund, Digital Currency Group and Cadenza Ventures, among others, is aiming to incentivize more crypto devs to choose Flow as the blockchain they build their projects on with investments, token grants and development support.

The startup is looking to capitalize momentum behind NFT profile pic collections and ENS (.eth) handles to build out a network of NFT-based avatar identity products. Genies, an LA-based digital avatar startup, announced Tuesday that it had raised $150 million in funding from Silver Lake, with participation from others.

The company has built on top of many of its virtual properties — for example, it launched a retail store concept in Decentraland two weeks ago, which it plans to expand into other metaverse platforms, Yorio said.

Users had the option of exchanging the comic NFT over a short period for a spot in the Pixel Vault founder’s DAO, a crypto collective which gave them ownership in a substantial collection of NFT artwork which included a number of CryptoPunks NFTs worth millions at current prices that were the main characters of the Pixel Vault comic.

The firm ballooning valuation, which surged from a $1.5 billion valuation it was given just six months ago by Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, is reflective of their own volume growth but also that of other flagship NFT firms including Dapper Labs, which raised at a $7.6 billion valuation last year. The NFT space saw plenty of action in 2021, but OpenSea realizing this valuation will rely on its continued success and its ability to entice newbies into the burgeoning world of crypto collectibles.