If you want to build a new era of “Supreme” for digital audiences, NFT will be indispensable.
Original title: “Musk was “carried”, NFT “fried shoes” spreading fashion circles 丨 Witness
Written by: Blocklike Editing Room
With Tesla’s stock price rising, Bitcoin soaring, and Dogecoin becoming popular, Elon Musk has recently stood directly at the center of public opinion in the crypto community.
Under the influence of Musk’s strong “carrying ability”, a pair of virtual shoes he once “was” worn has also caused a cross-circle collision between the fashion industry and the crypto community.
A studio called RTFKT Studios once posted a photo of Musk attending an event on an Instagram account with 600,000 fans. In the photo, Musk was wearing a pair of unique shoes, which attracted a large number of fans inquiring about prices.
However, this is not a pair of “real existence” sneakers. In the real event, Musk didn’t wear those shoes.
Surrounding “sports shoes”, the crypto community can always play new tricks.
This is a pair of “virtual shoes” designed by RTFKT Studios. It is inspired by the Cybertruck electric pickup truck launched by Musk. To some extent, Elon Musk is the first person ever to “wear” virtual shoes. However, the “virtual” attribute of this pair of shoes did not affect the love and fascination of many enthusiasts. Although this pair of shoes did not exist in the real world, it was finally sold for 15,000 US dollars at the time.
Is this price too expensive?
Today, on the RTFKT official website, the price of this pair of “virtual shoes” has risen to $60,238.
This seems to be a more interesting new branch of the NFT field.
From virtual shoes to virtual fashion: a new branch of NFT?
In the reports of many overseas media and encryption communities, the concept of “virtual fashion” has been introduced to such NFT products. This is different from previous NFT collections, cards, games, etc. The selling point of this type of virtual product is “design.”
In the “virtual shoes” product, each pair of sneakers has a unique concept and bold design. In RTFKT Studios, these virtual shoes have more vivid titles, Cybersneaker (cyber sports shoes) or NZXT (gaming sports shoes). The design of virtual shoes has weakened the practicality. Therefore, these designs are often extremely Imaginative.
These new design products are regularly auctioned on its website. Users use digital currency to bid. The winning bidder will exclusively use customized AR filters so that they can “wear” these shoes on Snapchat, Instagram and other social platforms. Most It is displayed in the form of the game or photos. To some extent, this is more like using digital currency to buy a kind of “game props” or “game skins” that have been chained. Therefore, digital currency enthusiasts from the community call this “the number one player comes true.” “.
At present, these platforms are also communicating and cooperating with major game manufacturers to enable players to wear these virtual products in more game characters.
Since last year, some digitally processed photos of “virtual shoes” have begun to spread “viral” in overseas communities. On Instagram, many “millennials” have a good impression of such cool virtual shoes. RTFKT’s high-profile photos include the Infinity Gauntlet infinity gloves covered with Gucci Monogram leaving Air Jordan hanging in the air, Kanye West and DJ Khaled wearing oversized spoof sneakers, the debut of PlayStation 5 sneakers and so on. Although most virtual shoes are illogical in reality, such posts are quickly attracting more and more followers.
Whale Shark, a well-known NFT collector in the crypto community and an early investor in BTC, was also one of the first followers interested in these virtual shoes. Last year, Whale Shark bought a pair of virtual shoes called “The X Evolution” for 22 ETH, and set a record for the highest purchase at the time. According to the official introduction, the inspiration for this pair of shoes obviously comes from the iconic Nike Dunk High.
Image source: RTFKT official website
Whale Shark publicly stated that the reason for his bidding was that he wanted to see how “design” evolved. In comparison, for NFT enthusiasts, sports shoes are undoubtedly an area that is easy to appreciate.
Supporters of virtual fashion can fully understand the needs of this new generation, and some believe that: “Virtual fashion is no different from people’s social dynamics in real life, because many people currently spend most of their time in the virtual world and Friends spent time together, it makes sense for people to hope their avatars are popular.”
Soon, this kind of “digital fashion” has spread from shoes to the field of “fashion”.
Recently, RTFKT took advantage of the victory and launched its first non-sports shoe product “Meta Jacket”. The principle is similar, this “jacket” can be worn and used in a virtual scene. The design style is like this:
Image source: RTFKT official website
For bidding or purchasing such virtual clothing, the NFT received by the buyer includes the graphic, Dress X fitting, material composition, and Decentraland skin. At the same time, the platform also discloses the relevant records of some apparel ownership:
It can be seen that this type of NFT product mainly uses the ERC-1155 protocol. The ERC-1155 protocol was proposed by the CTO of Enjin, the NFT head platform, and officially became the official Ethereum token standard in 2019. The ERC-1155 protocol is characterized by a digital asset protocol with a classification function for flexible creation and management of digital assets. Through the ERC-1155 protocol, NFT and FT can be issued simultaneously in the same smart contract. Since the protocol exhibits relatively high-quality characteristics in uniqueness, data scalability, nested combination, authority control, and the relationship with the contract, it is very suitable for the production and distribution of NFTs by project parties, game parties, and users.
Different from the logic of “physical first and then virtual products”, these virtual products first portray virtual products that highlight the superiority of design, and on this basis, explore the combination of physical and digital. This digital form enhances users’ experience of wearing luxury goods. The platform believes that this type of NFT is a key focus when the AR and VR trends are more obvious. Some analysts believe that in the distant future, the ownership of an item similar to a “shoe” or “jacket” may be composed of a “virtual product” and a “physical entity.”
These interesting “cross-circle” products have also triggered many people’s thinking about “design” and “fashion.”
RTFKT is optimistic that this is a fashion future created by gamers and fashion lovers, and emphasizes the creativity and value of a new generation of digital artists. While introducing the concept of “digital fashion” to the crypto community, they also introduced the concept of “NFT and digital art” to the traditional fashion industry. Virtual reality, game skins, and cryptocurrency have also been innovatively incorporated into their views on ” In the discussion of the future of fashion.
From “fried shoes” to “fried fashion”
The combination of sports shoes and the concept of NFT has a long history.
At the end of 2019, the US sportswear giant Nike announced a patent called “CryptoKicks”. It triggered a wave of discussions on “encrypted shoes”.
Nike’s idea is that when consumers buy a pair of “CryptoKicks” encrypted shoes, they will also receive the Token (NFT) generated based on the sneakers. According to the official introduction, Nike Token may adopt a dual-token model: a Token corresponds to physical shoes, issuing ST (securities tokens), recording and authenticating the information of sports shoes, and the association of physical sports shoes and ST represents Ownership of the sports shoes; another kind of Token corresponds to “digital shoes”, which is called a UT (functional token) that is more suitable for new gameplay. Combining the shapes of different sports shoes, deriving generations The new shoe model, the idea of ​​deriving new shoes is very similar to the “crypto cat”.
Although Nick’s sneakers did not continue to speak on the “encrypted shoes”. But in recent years, around the hype in the sports shoe market, the collection of sports shoes has slowly turned into an investment item.
About a year ago, American securities research company Cowen Equity Research listed sports shoes as an emerging alternative asset class. Since then, the sports shoe market itself has shown little sign of slowing down. In the second half of 2019, there was also a “fried shoe wave” in the sports shoe market. Prompted by certain factors, some sports shoes have deviated from the ordinary concept of commodity trading and the essence of collection, and have been given financial concepts such as “cloud fried shoes” and “shoe futures.”
As for the new NFT virtual shoes, the design and distribution platform is guiding its development in the direction of “luxury”. These brands pay great attention to the scarcity of single products. RTFKT’s sports shoes are currently only produced in one model, and products of brands such as Tribute are also strictly controlling production, thereby boosting the value of virtual clothing.
A recent research published by the research data resource website Statista shows that by the end of 2022, consumers will spend 50 billion US dollars on game “skins.” “Skins” allow consumers to change the appearance of their characters in the game. Although this kind of virtual design has been slow to enter the game market, it has become an inevitable trend for “fashion” to penetrate into the virtual world.
However, the recent rapid changes in digital currencies have also increased the fluctuations in the value of NFT virtual products linked to it. The co-founder of RTFKT also frankly believes that for ordinary users, this may not be the best time. At the same time, with the recent upsurge of Bitcoin and the rising price of ETH, some players’ bidding for virtual shoes has slowed down.
Through NFT, virtual clothing has become a beautiful canvas under the application of blockchain technology, bringing new ideas to the application scenarios of NFT. Although there are still uncertainties in the market, we can be sure that if we want to build a new era of “Supreme” for digital audiences, NFT may be indispensable.
