Top Shot Developer Announces $725M Fund to Support Flow Ecosystem

The Flow ecosystem will be backed by a new $725 million fund that will be used to invest in the growth of the NFT network.

Flow is a layer1 blockchain developed by Dapper Labs, designed specifically for NFT. Dapper Labs also created the popular NBA Top Shot NFT collection. Flow uses an environmentally friendly Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus algorithm.

The new fund is backed by 17 firms with experience backing other Web3 companies, including large investment firms a16z, Spartan Group and CoinFund. The funds will be used to entice developers to bring their work to Flow, rather than rival ethereum, which still dominates the NFT space despite its high gas fees. Within the Flow ecosystem, these funds will power games, infrastructure, decentralized finance (DeFi), content, and creators.

Projects funded through this ecosystem fund will be backed by investments in FLOW tokens.

Flow is currently the blockchain with the third highest NFT sales, behind Ethereum and Solana. Excluding May, Flow will average $50.3 million in monthly NFT sales throughout 2022, according to NFT market tracker CryptoSlam.

LG Doucet, host of the NFT podcast The First Mint, took to Twitter on Tuesday to list five new products that he believes should receive funding. They include an app to help users get whitelisted for casting, a mobile app, video education, wallet integration on Shopify, and non-cartoon, animal, and athlete art. He added that Flow needs to "really innovate, not just copy the roadmap of the ETH project."

Although Flow is operated by Dapper Labs, which has produced some of the largest NFT products in the past two years, its NFT sales still lag behind the larger layer1 ecosystem. This may be due to weaker network effects and a smaller ecosystem of decentralized applications (Dapps) running on it. The new Ecosystem Fund aims to address this shortcoming.

Other NFT products from Dapper Labs include CryptoKitties, one of the first NFT games, as well as UFC Strike, NFL All Day and Cheeze Wizards.

According to data from CoinGecko, FLOW has a market capitalization of $1.4 billion and its price has risen 20% in the past 24 hours to $4.01.

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