Harrison Wang has a theory: More people would buy non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, if this category of blockchain-based art and trading cards were called something else.
“I think when people think NFT's, it's just daunting for them,” he says. “So that’s why we’ve been calling them ‘digital collectibles.’ It’s also why we rebranded.” Yes, investor and early customer feedback informed him and his cofounders that the name for their The Non Fungible Token Company stunk. So they’ve changed it to, simply, Unblocked, a nod to the startup’s mission to remove some hurdles to purchasing NFTs.
Those investors recently showered Unblocked in real-life money: It has raised a $10 million seed round at a $90 million valuation, a high price tag for such an early round—even in crypto, where heady numbers abound. Tiger Global led the investment, which included the maker of NBA Top Shots, Dapper Labs; the singer Shawn Mendes; Jay-Z’s Marcy Ventures Partners; and Oaktree Capital Management.
What does Unblocked do exactly? It is, broadly speaking, a consultancy, which will build a big brand or a big celebrity a bespoke NFT platform. They’ve done a couple already, one for hip-hop group Cypress Group, another for Billboard. (Billboard’s parent company, Penske Media, contributed to the seed money, too.) Unblocked platforms are meant to be as simple and as visually appealing as possible. (Many existing ones are neither.) With this, Wang, who is CEO, is taking a page directly from Dapper’s playbook: Dapper’s release of a sleek and easily used marketplace for Top Shots—video trading cards of basketball players and highlights—ignited the early fervor for NFTs a year ago. They’re collectively now worth nearly a billion dollars.
On an Unblocked platform, a brand will be able to create and distribute NFTs, as well as establish a secondary marketplace for collectors to continue trading them, theoretically continuing to fuel interest for original sales as well as resales. In addition, the Unblocked apps will feature a directory and allow people to list their social media handles to sites like Twitter and Discord, hopefully sparking online communities around the NFTs, which would also help keeping the markets going. Everything is built on Flow, the blockchain launched by Dapper.
Unblocked’s decision to rename itself and to refer to NFTs by the less dorky sounding “digital collectibles” sits in a broader discussion happening around NFTs and what’s called Web 3, a movement in technology for more industries—beyond art and collectibles—to embrace the blockchain. These supporters would like to see widespread adoption happen quickly but continue to recounter resistance, much of it routed in the lingering complexity around completing even the most basic tasks, like buying and selling