From Digital Cats to $7.6 Billion: Roham Gharegozlou and the Dapper Labs Fortune
CryptoKitties clogged Ethereum in 2017. Four years later, the company it spawned was valued at $7.6 billion on the back of basketball NFTs. Then came the crash, layoffs and a $4 million settlement.
In December 2017, a game about breeding cartoon cats did something no hacker had managed: it slowed the whole Ethereum network to a crawl. CryptoKitties was so popular that transactions backed up for hours, and the people who built it suddenly found themselves at the centre of a new industry.
The company that grew out of it, Dapper Labs, led by CEO Roham Gharegozlou, would raise money at a $7.6 billion valuation four years later. It is one of the biggest fortunes the blockchain-games world has produced, and one of the clearest examples of how quickly it can shrink.
A cat game from a Vancouver studio
CryptoKitties began inside Axiom Zen, a Vancouver venture studio, and launched in late November 2017. Each cat was an NFT with its own "genes", and two cats could be bred to produce a new one with traits from both parents. Rare cats sold for serious money.
The craze was short but intense. In September 2018, a cat called Dragon sold for 600 ETH, about $170,000 at the time, the most anyone had paid for a CryptoKitty (more record sales). The team spun out as Dapper Labs in 2018 and set out to fix the problem its own game had exposed: Ethereum could not handle a hit.
The basketball jackpot
Dapper's answer was its own blockchain, Flow, and its breakout product was not a game at all. NBA Top Shot, launched in 2020, sold officially licensed video highlights, "Moments", as collectible NFTs. During the 2021 boom, it became one of the best-selling NFT products in the world.
The money followed. In September 2021, Dapper Labs raised $250 million in a round led by Coatue, reportedly valuing it at $7.6 billion, and announced a deal with Spain's LaLiga. For Gharegozlou and the founding team, that number made them among the wealthiest people in the NFT world, at least on paper. As with most private crypto companies, no verified personal net worth has been published by Forbes or Bloomberg.
When the hype faded
The NFT crash of 2022 hit Dapper hard. Trading volumes for Top Shot Moments fell far from their peak, and the company went through several rounds of layoffs as it cut costs.
Legal trouble came too. Buyers of Top Shot Moments brought a class action arguing that the NFTs were unregistered securities. In June 2024, Dapper Labs agreed to settle the case for $4 million.
Meanwhile, CryptoKitties itself had long since stopped being a phenomenon. IEEE Spectrum later called its fall "the spectacular collapse of CryptoKitties, the first big blockchain game", as breeding pushed supply far beyond demand and prices for ordinary cats sank.
Where Roham Gharegozlou is now
Gharegozlou still leads Dapper Labs, which continues to run Top Shot and Flow and has signed other sports and entertainment licences. The company is much smaller than in 2021, and the $7.6 billion valuation has not been repeated in any reported funding since.
Why it matters
Dapper's story is a reminder that the biggest money from a blockchain game is not always made by the game. CryptoKitties was the hit; the fortune came from the infrastructure and the licensed collectibles built on what the team learned. It is also a cautionary tale about valuations set at the top of a cycle. A price someone paid in September 2021 is a fact, but it is not the same thing as wealth that lasts.
Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.