An aspect of the creator economy that is extremely interesting is the digital fashion industry. Currently, the fashion industry is a 3 trillion dollar behemoth consisting of fast fashion, designers, retail brands, and everything in between. Fashion allows individuals to express creativity and self-expression and push the limits of what materials can be molded into. This desire and love of expression, colors, and patterns have already begun to seep into the digital world through digital avatar skins and costumes in games. For example, Fortnite, one of the biggest free-to-play battle royale games, brought in 1.8 billion dollars in revenue in 2019 and almost all of it was due to in-game purchases of perks, power-ups, different access levels, and skins. All of these purchases were for digital assets and the process is already understood and accepted as the norm by all game and app developers and players. However, in these games, only your “party”, the group of players you play with, can see and identify you as that skin as other opponents will not be able to link your identity to your skin. If players are already paying for this capability, imagine what could be possible with full digital ownership and identification of players through their skins using NFTs and blockchain technology.
Additionally, the fashion industry is extremely wasteful. Samples of clothing and fast fashion contribute massively to pollution, waste, and unsafe labor conditions worldwide, but with the use of digital fashion, these drawbacks could be greatly reduced. Hyper-realistic fashion models can reduce all the waste in the prototyping and design process and offer solutions to logistics and communications issues due to the process being a majority digital.
Lastly, the fashion industry, especially designers, prides itself on exclusivity and luxury. Although great for the value of a brand, this alienates most of the population who can not afford or access the clothing they desire to express their beliefs, feelings, and style. Furthermore, the emergence of social media has amplified users’ constant desire and need to show off and maintain a reputation which can be exhausting and embarrassing to individuals who do not have the wealth or ability to keep up with styles and brands that become popularized. Digital fashion can offer up a solution to this dilemma by offering hyper-personalized and realistic fashion digitally that can be shared on social media, sometimes to a point where others may not even be able to tell if the article of clothing is tangible or not. Companies like DressX offer services where customers can upload an image, purchase a digital fashion piece, and have the outfit digitally dressed on themselves and easily ready to share on platforms such as Instagram.
Here are a couple of videos describing DressX’s specific process, but the overall concept can still be applied throughout the industry in other ways.
One company that I think has the most ambitious and interesting goal is Digitalax. Digitalax is building a digital fashion operating system, NFT fashion marketplace, and Esports integration platform to allow users to purchase and own rare clothes, use those clothes across different game universes and the metaverse, and design future digital fashion. This is an insanely cool and unique take on the NFT and fashion industries and is deserving of a deeper dive into the company's inner workings.
What Do They Do:
DIGITALAX implements an optimized architecture for creating 3D digital fashion that can quickly be deployed directly into any media layer (Gaming, VR, other live 3D content environments). The goal of DIGITALAX is to enable people to display and express their identity, self-expression, and beliefs in the digital world and forthcoming metaverse. Furthermore, the DIGITALAX platform is set up dynamically for the growth of decentralization and digital ownership, where interoperability, security, sustainability, and design are prioritized. Some key motivations and goals for the fashion engine are as follows:
- Create a Digital Fashion Operating System (DFOS) that consists of an efficient digital fashion NFT distribution channel and content supply chain on Ethereum, a new file intercommunication format between 3D digital fashion applications and game engines, and a Player-Creator digital economy system that weaves digital fashion across all industries and platforms
- Enable players and participants to develop and sustain a digital identity that can be transferred across games and used for income from either winning events or receiving sponsored digital apparel
- Allow designers and artists to empower themselves by securing the distribution and usage rights to their designs and selling fractional ownership of patterns, materials, and fabric
- Develop hyper-personalized immersive 3D experiences, events, and galleries that will jointly help grow the tangible and digital fashion industries and will create next level highly interactive and successful interactions for trying on clothes and experiencing the art that goes with the collections
- Significantly reduce the waste of the fashion industry, specifically fast fashion, by using VR and digital modeling to prototype designs before going to production as well as demonstrate to customers the fit and look before tailoring
Token Economics
The native token to the DIGITALAX ecosystem is the $MONA token, an ERC-20 utility token used for governance, staking, rewards, loans, and incentives. In terms of gameplay, the use of the $MONA token can be broken down into two categories, developer use and player use. Becoming a liquidity provider for $MONA consists of taking tokens from a MONA/ETH Uniswap pool.
For a game developer, the token is used as a prize reward for winning players by purchasing the token and staking it on their featured games to be transferred to winners. For a fashion developer/designer, the token is used to digitally sponsor players through flash loans, enabling the player to purchase digital fashion assets under the sponsor’s brand. Then instead of paying back the “loan”, the player “repays” through winning more events and games, which unlocks more eligibility for more $MONA, and an income has now been created.
For a player, the token is used as a ledger and leaderboard of sorts to display skill and success across games. Players become eligible for sponsorship at a certain level of success and can leverage their $MONA for staking, prize pools, or other ways to generate value. At a certain point, it seems as if the more $MONA you have, the more flexibility and access you have across different digital ecosystems, which is ideal for communities looking for a way to establish a secure digital identity and livelihood.
In the future, DAOs may be developed as well as other community proposals but similar to most utility tokens, there is a decentralized governance and voting system of $MONA holders that can institute changes for the platform.
My Take:
DIGITALAX’s business and industry plans are forward-thinking and hyper-focused on having a significant impact in the current and future digital fashion market segment. The space is already much more developed than it is led on to be and that is why DIGITALAX has grown so fast and been so successful. So far, the recent NFT phase of hype, spending, and excitement has been mainly focused around art, but at the end of the day, those NFTs are truly investments and assets in one's personal art gallery curated for themselves. The step DIGITALAX takes, similar to some of the NFT use cases in Decentraland, is to find utility and action out of these NFTs socially and economically different from pieces just accruing value from exclusivity and the minter. Incorporating DIGITALAX’s technology into a fashion NFT marketplace and Esports creates identity in the digital world by forever linking players with their fashion/skin/costume. In the current digital social landscape, many people are left behind and left marveling at influencers and celebrities' ability to enrich their lives with their own beliefs and expression and creating a mainstream option to acquire a form of that through fashion will be revolutionary for the type of content and social interactions in the future. Digital fashion will allow for environments and stories to be built around the clothes, like how albums and movies have used transmedia. Being able to try on and make and create outfits by mixing and matching is the next step into expression and creative discovery.
DIGITALAX has built the infrastructure and backend for massive developments in-game economies with their native ERC-20 utility token $MONA. Best said in the whitepaper, $MONA is “incorporated throughout the protocol’s architecture, serving to further incentivize utility and application in the Player-Creator economy. $MONA is the gas that ties together a triad of interdependence between Players, Developers, and Designers in a world that is merging the digital and real.” The $MONA token is used for governance, staking, rewards, loans, and incentives across the entire landscape and as more games become plugged in with their causal Esports platform, ESPA. ESPA is the first-ever casual Esports platform for indie developers, modders, designers, and players where skins and wearables can directly translate to consistent income streams and an ability to make a livelihood. This is the third layer and most ground-breaking development of the DIGITALAX platform and has recently launched beta versions as of this year.
I am very confident in DIGITALAX as a major player in the digital fashion and gaming landscape for all of these reasons and goals. The engineering, structure, goals, and motivation of the team and their founder are extremely encouraging and comforting. Furthermore, the rapid development of the project from last fall shows a market and consumer demand for DIGITALAX’s capabilities.
Links To Models and External Resources:
Website
Whitepaper
Discord
Additional Links