Dapper Labs' Flow token auction closes at 4X the price of 'community sale'

Dapper Labs, the team behind pioneering non-fungible token (NFT)-powered collectibles Cryptokitties and NBA Top Shot, has completed a dutch auction for the native token of their blockchain, Flow.

Dutch auctions allow investors to place bids at which they are willing to purchase tokens prior to the commencement of the sale, with the price moving down from the opening price until all of the tokens are sold. All participants pay the same final clearing price.

Bidding for the Flow auction started at $1 at 5 am PT on Oct. 6, and lasted for five hours before finding a final settlement price of $0.38. Coinlist was predicting a final price of $0.28 three hours into the auction, indicating that several large bids were entered late into the auction.

Two percent, or 25 million tokens, out of Flow’s entire supply, was sold through the auction. The tokens are now subject to a 12-month lock-up.

Dapper Labs decided to build the Flow blockchain after their first release, Cryptokitties, notoriously caused extreme congestion on the Ethereum (ETH) network after launching in late 2017. 

The auction was the second Flow token sale, following from the Oct. 2 ‘community sale’ that allowed non-U.S. residents to purchase 10,000 Flow Tokens each at the pre-seed investment price of $0.10 per token.

The community sale nearly tripled Coinlist’s previous record of roughly 4,500 participants for a single token sale, with more than 12,000 investors jumping to buy Flow at pre-seed prices. The tokens sold through the community sale are subject to a 24-month lock-up, with half of the tokens unlocked in 12-months time, and the remaining tokens scheduled for a linear release over the next 12 months.

Roughly 24-hours before the Dutch auction, Dapper launched two new packs of collectibles for NBA Top Shot — Dapper’s gamified crypto-collectibles release comprising the first application built on the Flow blockchain.

The third of five waves of the ‘Premium Pack 2’ series saw all 1,492 packs sell out in roughly one minute at $24 each, while roughly 1,600 of the 8,991 ‘Eastern Conference Finals’ series have been sold over the past 24 hours. Top Shot launched in open beta one week ago after driving more than $2 million worth of sales among its 17,000 closed beta users.