Entertainment giant Disney will be the focus of an officially licensed NFT collectibles platform from NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs called Disney Pinnacle, the NFT startup announced Tuesday.
Inspired by the physical pins that Disney sells at its theme parks and that fans collect and trade, Disney Pinnacle will offer pin-inspired digital collectibles that are minted as NFTs on the Flow blockchain—the same network as NBA Top Shot and NFL All Day.
The platform will include digital pins based on Disney, Pixar, and Star Wars characters and properties. In an interview with Decrypt, Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou mentioned such characters as Buzz Lightyear and Woody from “Toy Story,” the Disney Princesses, and Darth Vader from “Star Wars” as some that will be in the mix.
While Disney also owns Marvel, the comic book IP wasn't mentioned in the announcement. Asked if Marvel is coming to the platform, Gharegozlou said, “not at launch.”
Disney Pinnacle was designed from the ground up for mobile, unlike Top Shot, which launched first on the web and later added a native mobile app. While there will be similarities with Dapper’s other NFT platforms, Gharegozlou said it will feel well suited for smartphones and feature enhancements to its familiar format.
“It's an updated economy design, so it’s better balanced between the accessibility for the everyday fan as well as the limited edition and super limited edition assets for some of the higher-end collectors,” he said. “And it's access to the whole Disney universe, under one roof.”
Disney Pinnacle is opening up its waitlist today. Gharegozlou said that the platform will gradually onboard users to help test the experience in beta before an eventual full launch. No timeline has been established for the public rollout, he added.
Ridhima Kahn, Dapper’s VP of business development and partnerships, told Decrypt that she introduced Disney to Dapper Labs when she was a partner at VC giant Andreessen Horowitz. She joined Dapper in 2021 and was able to help unite the firms for this collaboration after making the original connection between them.
Dapper Labs is best known for the dramatic mainstream success that NBA Top Shot experienced as the NFT market first took flight in 2021. The company, which had previously launched the influential early Ethereum NFT project CryptoKitties, built the Flow blockchain to handle broader-scale consumer applications like collectibles platforms and games. Flow has been gradually decentralized over time.
The Disney Pinnacle announcement comes amid recent signs of a revival for the NFT market, which had lost considerable steam following the peaks of 2021 and early 2022. Gharegozlou suggested that the next wave of platforms and apps built around true digital ownership will look and feel better than those that first introduced NFTs to the masses.
“When we launched our last suite of products, it was clear that NFTs were still sort of in their ‘dial-up’ stage, in the sense of the kinds of products you had access to and how portable and interoperable everything was,” he said. “We're so excited about where the future of this technology is going, and how much better products are going to get over the coming years.”