Dapper Labs makes blockchain invisible for millions of fans with HIFI
The Company
For over 150 years, sports collectibles have played a central role connecting fans, sports, teams, players, and moments. The industry which began as advertising inserts in tobacco products has evolved into a global business worth tens of billions of dollars today. Throughout that evolution, the premise has remained constant: own a small, scarce, officially licensed artifact that ties you to a player or a moment in the sport's history.
Digital cards existed for years but never really moved the format forward. That changed in 2017 with the arrival of non-fungible tokens, which introduced provable, portable, permanent ownership of unique digital assets. NFTs made it possible to collect things that had never been collectable before.
Dapper Labs, one of the early architects of the NFT category, saw an opportunity to innovate on collectibles with moments: the buzzer-beater, the game-saving block, the dunk that made the highlight reel. Dapper launched NBA Top Shot in partnership with the NBA in October 2020, and a fan could, for the first time, own the actual clip of LeBron's chase-down block from Game 7.
Today, Dapper Labs builds consumer apps for sports and entertainment fans, with partners that include the NBA and Disney. The promise across every product is the same: own an officially licensed piece of the moments and characters you love, and trade them with other fans in a marketplace that runs around the clock.
The Problem
Most collectors on Dapper's platforms don't think of themselves as crypto users. Over 80% onboard via credit card, and most are drawn by the collectibles and brands rather than an interest in crypto. Dapper aims to ensure that collectors never have to think about what's happening underneath the app.
“We want them to like it for the benefits it gives them, rather than for the details of the technology."
— Roham Gharegozlou, CEO, Dapper
Delivering the benefits of crypto with the user experience of great technology is ambitious. The Dapper marketplaces run 24/7 with bursts of activity around pack drops and millions of users who expect the app to behave like any other consumer product they use.
Adding a layer of complexity, Dapper's collectibles live on Flow, a blockchain optimized for NFTs. When NBA Top Shot launched, Flow had no production-grade stablecoin infrastructure, so money movement had to settle elsewhere. Dapper selected Polygon for payment settlement, which meant every purchase triggered two settlements: the collectible on Flow, the stablecoin payment on Polygon, with platform fees settling in between.
Flow also offers a feature unique among major chains: custodial wallets can be configured to hold NFTs without the ability to store fungible tokens. That meant Dapper could safely manage the collectibles themselves while routing the money side to a specialized partner. Dapper needed an infrastructure partner that could orchestrate stablecoin settlement with speed and consistency, bring money into and out of the platform, and build alongside Dapper's engineering team as the product roadmap evolved.
Why HIFI
Dapper evaluated infrastructure partners against four requirements: composability with their existing stack, robust settlement across US and global rails, scalability through pack-drop bursts, and a team that could move at their pace.
Composable infrastructure. Dapper's marketplace logic and rules engine determine who can buy what, when packs drop, and how state flows through the system. Dapper needed a lower layer: APIs for accounts and asset movement that its own system could call into. HIFI's primitives slot in beneath the application layer, exposing wallet provisioning, onchain transfers, and settlement as discrete building blocks Dapper could wire into the architecture it had already designed.
Global settlement coverage. Fans and sellers on Dapper's platforms live everywhere, and Dapper needs to move money in and out wherever they are. HIFI covers both sides: stablecoin pay-in, fiat pay-out to local bank accounts, and the rails in between, across US and international corridors.
Institutional-grade scalability. Marketplace activity comes in bursts: pack drops concentrate buying into narrow windows, with thousands of transactions hitting custody and settlement at once. HIFI's infrastructure handles both profiles in production: peak load during drops, sustained throughput between them, with the reliability a marketplace at this scale requires.
Partnership and speed. When Dapper migrated onto HIFI, the two engineering teams ran the cutover together. Tens of millions in stablecoin assets across hundreds of thousands of user wallets moved onto HIFI with no downtime and no user disruption. The teams coordinated directly, ran the migration over multiple days, and monitored around the clock until it was done.
"We were braced for calamity, and the whole thing was just boringly smooth."
— Bart Bobnis, Staff Backend Engineer, Dapper
How It Works
Dapper orchestrates the holding and transfer of collectibles while HIFI handles the money movement. Dapper's team is built to run the marketplace and the NFT experience, and separating wallets for NFT and financial transactions allows Dapper to focus on it’s core business of digital collectibles. Moving stablecoins between counterparties, settling against fiat, and managing the operational work that comes with it is what HIFI does.
Today, HIFI processes over 100k transactions a day for Dapper.
When a user taps buy, the collectible transfers to them on Flow and they own it the instant the transaction confirms. The money side, including the payment, fees, and eventual fiat payout, runs asynchronously on HIFI, reconciled against the onchain activity on Flow.
This allows the user to see an instant purchase while underneath, two settlement systems are running in parallel.
"It's just faster to buy on Dapper than anywhere else because of this."
— Bart Bobnis, Staff Backend Engineer, Dapper
Composable infrastructure solutions
Dapper and HIFI continue to co-engineer solutions as new operational challenges surface.
Batch optimization
As volume grew, processing each transfer as an individual onchain operation became a bottleneck in Dapper's reconciliation pipeline, causing a delay in the user experience of purchasing. The teams built a batch transfer functionality that bundles many transfers from one source to multiple destinations into a single operation, settling atomically. In just one week, reconciliation stabilized and the backlog cleared.
"It unclogged us completely."
— Bart Bobnis, Staff Backend Engineer, Dapper
Bridging to Ethereum
Dapper's onramp and offramp flows used to run through Ethereum only. Liquidity for fiat conversions sat in an operational wallet that the team had to manually replenish by bridging stablecoins from Polygon, and when pre-allocated funds depleted, the entire conversion pipeline stalled. HIFI built bridging into the API: Dapper specifies the originating and destination chains, and the transfer routes automatically with predictable settlement time and 1:1 crosschain bridging.
Treasury operations
Holding its treasury with HIFI gives Dapper fewer reconciliation surfaces and a single operational view across consumer activity and company reserves. Because pay-in and pay-out run on the same platform, Dapper can expand into new corridors without standing up new integrations. And because funds never leave HIFI to move between operational accounts and reserves, Dapper reduces both the compliance surface for monitoring suspicious activity and the counterparty risk of moving money between providers.
What's Next
The Dapper roadmap extends in two directions: consolidating existing operations and launching new products on the same infrastructure to further improve interoperability.
On the consolidation side, HIFI is rolling out Flow EVM and PYUSD0 support, which will let Dapper's stablecoin operations and its collectibles settle on the same network. Bringing both sides onto one chain improves long-term performance and opens the door to new use cases for user funds as the Flow ecosystem expands.
Across both products, Dapper is building crypto for people who don't think of themselves as crypto users but still deserve full ownership over their digital lives. HIFI gives them the infrastructure to do it without compromising on either side.
FAQ
What is Dapper Labs' partnership with HIFI?
Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot and other officially licensed sports and entertainment collectibles, uses HIFI to handle all stablecoin settlement behind its marketplaces. Dapper's own systems manage the collectibles themselves, provisioned on Flow, while HIFI moves the money for stablecoin pay-in, fiat payout, and everything in between. HIFI processes over 100,000 transactions a day for Dapper today.
Why did Dapper need a dedicated stablecoin infrastructure partner instead of building this in-house?
Flow, the blockchain Dapper's collectibles live on, had no production-grade stablecoin infrastructure when NBA Top Shot launched, so Dapper's collectible purchases and stablecoin payments had to settle on two different chains. Flow also lets custodial wallets hold NFTs without the ability to store fungible tokens, which meant Dapper could safely manage collectibles itself but needed a partner to orchestrate the money side. HIFI brings funds into and out of the platform with the speed and consistency a 24/7 marketplace like Dapper requires.
How did Dapper migrate onto HIFI without disrupting users?
Dapper's and HIFI's engineering teams ran the cutover together, moving tens of millions of dollars in stablecoin assets across hundreds of thousands of user wallets with no downtime and no user disruption. The migration ran over multiple days with both teams monitoring around the clock until it was complete.
How does a purchase actually work if collectibles and payments settle on different systems?
When a user taps buy, the collectible transfers to them on Flow and they own it the instant the transaction confirms. The money side, the payment, fees, and eventual fiat payout, runs asynchronously on HIFI, reconciled against that onchain activity afterward. The user sees an instant purchase while two settlement systems run in parallel underneath it.
What problem did HIFI's batch transfer functionality solve for Dapper?
As volume grew, processing every transfer as an individual onchain operation became a bottleneck in Dapper's reconciliation pipeline, delaying the purchase experience for users. HIFI and Dapper built batch transfer functionality that bundles many transfers from one source to multiple destinations into a single operation that settles atomically. Reconciliation stabilized and the backlog cleared within one week of shipping it.
What's next for Dapper and HIFI?
HIFI is rolling out Flow EVM and PYUSD0 support, which will let Dapper's stablecoin operations settle on the same network as its collectibles instead of two separate chains. That consolidation is meant to improve long-term performance and open up new use cases for user funds as the Flow ecosystem expands.
