The fact that one of the biggest names in the NFT boom, a company that once created digital collectibles worth thousands of dollars from NBA highlight clips, settled a privacy lawsuit for five dollars per person is subtly telling. Not five hundred. Five, not fifty.
The Dapper VPPA Settlement, formally tied to the case Ohebshalom v. Dapper Labs, Inc., centers on allegations that Dapper Labs shared the personal information of its users with third parties without their consent. The Video Privacy Protection Act, a federal law that predates the majority of the internet, serves as the legal foundation. It was first passed in 1988 after a Washington reporter discovered a Supreme Court nominee’s video rental history. Since then, it has revived itself in the era of trackers, pixels, and behavioral advertising.
Dapper Labs operated several well-known platforms — NBA Top Shot, NFL All Day, UFC Strike, Disney Pinnacle, and La Liga Golazos — each built around the idea of owning a piece of sports or entertainment culture in digital form. The settlement class includes anyone who held an active account on those sites between June 15, 2020, and January 30, 2025. There are a lot of people in that large net.
The mechanics of the alleged violation involve tracking pixels — small pieces of code embedded in websites, used by companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Snap, Twitter, and TikTok to collect behavioral data. The lawsuit claimed these pixels were capturing information about what users purchased or watched, then transmitting that data to third parties without meaningful disclosure or user consent. Dapper disputes that it violated any laws. However, it decided to settle anyhow, as these cases usually do.
The total settlement fund sits at $5 million. Individual class members were eligible to receive up to $5 after attorneys received their fees, administrators were paid, and named plaintiffs received incentive awards. The deadline for filing claims was April 15, 2026. Anecdotally, some users on forums reported receiving around $75 — which would suggest the final per-person number depended on how many valid claims came in, not just the stated maximum.
Beyond the cash, there’s a behavioral requirement tucked into the settlement that may matter more in the long run. Until federal law changes or a court makes a different decision, Dapper Labs agreed to stop using those tracking pixels on any pages where they could record video purchases or viewing information. It’s a small concession, but it’s concrete. Pixels off indicates that no data was gathered. That is not insignificant.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that this settlement deviates from a larger trend. A comparable disclosure case was settled by AARP for $12.5 million. Willow.TV just reached a $850,000 deal over comparable allegations. The list continues to expand, including USConcealedCarry.com and DirectToU. After years of dormancy, the VPPA is now one of the more active instruments in consumer privacy litigation. Depending on who you ask, that may indicate a wave of opportunistic class action filings or actual legal exposure throughout the industry.
In that regard, Dapper Labs is an intriguing example. The company rode the NFT wave to near-mythic heights — NBA Top Shot alone generated close to $2 billion in sales at its peak — before the market cooled considerably. Navigating privacy class actions feels like a completely different chapter for the company that once seemed to be the future of sports fandom. While the focus was on floor prices and highlight reels, it seemed as though the legal exposure was constantly building up in the background.
Five dollars won’t exactly feel like justice to those who filed claims. But settlements like this rarely do. What they tend to do is shift behavior — quietly, incrementally — one pixel suspension at a time.
