Dapper Labs, the company behind CryptoKitties, has announced a partnership with leading mixed martial arts promotion, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
The partnership will allow UFC fans to own, maintain, and trade UFC-branded collectibles on Dapper Labs’ Flow platform.
Flow is Dapper Labs’ upcoming blockchain project, claiming to be a developer-friendly platform for building blockchain apps, games and digital assets to allow fans to own tokenised representations of collectibles including a number of fighters within the UFC, basically resembling Tamagotchis (remember those?). Fans will be able to train, level up, and even manage diets to qualify for different weight classes.
A Dapper Labs spokesperson has said that Flow:
has seen enormous interest from organizations and individuals across music, entertainment, and sports.
UFC senior vice president of global consumer products, Tracey Bleczinski says:
UFC is thrilled to partner with Dapper Labs to offer a new form of digital collectibles to our global fanbase. UFC prides itself on being innovators in sports technology, and Flow is another way to provide our fans with the best entertainment experience.
In game collectibles are a significant and growing area of gaming, and crypto-graphically secured non-fungible tokens represent a new kind of collectible object which can live on digitally for extended periods of time while permitting the owner to prove their ownership and the provenance of the collectible. It may seem like a frivolous use of blockchain but enables testing which is relevant to many other blockchain deployments.