Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs are among the emerging trends in cryptocurrency when Bitcoin continues to experience a bull market. Its vast array of uses with various industries makes it ripe for mainstream adoption, which blockchain and cryptocurrencies are still trying to attain.

Most of the hype around NFTs has been around digital art in 2021. Digital artists often fall victim to unethical and malicious users copying and distributing their work online. NFTs address those issues by allowing users to mint art as digital assets and help them drive up the price by making them scarce, as seen with Beeple’s $69 million price tag of his “First 5000 days” artwork on an NFT marketplace.

While digital art is just one of the several uses for NFTs, these other functions will introduce new valuable industries in the near future. Digital fashion through in-game skins is gradually taking the lead by being a lucrative source of revenue for designers. This trend is best described by Fortnite’s $2.4 billion revenue in 2018, with sales from skins as one of the major contributors.

Meanwhile, Felix “Pewdiepie” Kjellberg also launched an NFT skin set for Wallem, which netted an average of 41 ETH or around $80,000 at the OpenSea NFT marketplace. Today, purchasing one of those skins will cost you 995 ETH or approximately $2 million.

All Hail Digital Fashion

Those Pewdiepie NFT skins ushered in a new period in digital fashion. The industry has already embraced the creation of hyper-realistic 3D garments during the design and manufacturing process. This initiative helps promote sustainability and renewed productivity to designers. Through digital fashion prototypes, designers can review different designs or collections before producing them on cloth.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg as designers and brands are starting to integrate their products into gaming, VR, retail marketing, and live 3D environments. Imagine the limitless earning opportunities for designers in those fields. More importantly, designers can verify ownership of their creations. If Pewdiepie’s skins that are basic T-shirts could attract that much investment, what more advanced forms of digital art can NFTs help transcend?

Additionally, luxury brands can also open a new market by distributing high-end fashion to gaming enthusiasts. They can initiate business models like exclusive product lines for digital, cross-game collections, additional in-game merchandising, and sponsorship endorsements, to name a few.

The scarcity value that NFTs bring will motivate consumers to purchase designer items like clothes and shoes. Fashion brands can mint one-of-a-kind products for auction. They can also set a certain number of inventories as part of a collection and put a fixed price on each product.

Fractional Garment Ownership

A pioneering digital fashion NFT platform on the scene, DIGITALAX, which launched back in 2020 as the first ever dedicated live digital fashion NFT marketplace, allows creators to work together during the design process to create digital fashion items using ERC-1155 NFTs, which allow them to generate an NFT fragment. Therefore, the collaborators can focus on generating an NFT for a specific part of the design. One of them can work on the patterns while the others can concentrate on textures, garment shape, and fit.

When the finished NFT garment is sold, everyone who worked on the material gets a revenue share. Creators can also establish royalties throughout the duration of the NFT. Therefore, the original designers can continue to profit from their creations even if the digital fashion piece changes hands. That’s a feature that the physical fashion world cannot replicate from secondary sales.

Likewise, programming the smart contract ensures that intellectual property rights protect all patterns, garments, and textures. No one can duplicate the design and promote it as their own creation.

Digital fashion is here to stay.

The digital infrastructure that allows the fashion industry to mint tokens and relate them to games and VR engines is now in full swing, thanks to a new project called ESPA, launched under the pioneering digital fashion NFT platform, DIGITALAX. This platform allows esports gamers to buy digital fashion NFTs, which lets them join battles and competitions to win crypto-based prizes. Revenues are then distributed fairly to all concerned participants like developers and designers.

Once ESPA gets adopted by more gamers and VR users, digital fashion will create new streams of value. With the digital shift gaining rapid strides, NFT-based clothes and accessories will make games and VR environments appealing to new demographics of fashion lovers from around the world.