The wear-to-earn economy provides a new business for gamified fashion by promoting metaverse creativity.
The metaverse, a digital domain, is paving the way for a new reality in which virtual things live in gamified or parallel worlds online. Participants here can work, interact, own property, and exchange items that exist in a blockchain-based society. As businesses continue to invest substantially in this arena, brands must learn to traverse this new frontier and carve out a position for themselves in the digital world.
With increased interest in the metaverse and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), Space Runners is attempting to reduce some of the uncertainties associated with this transition. Space Runners is a metaverse fashion brand whose mission is to make interoperable fashion goods for the metaverse and to pioneer the first gamification of fashion.
By engaging with a variety of artists, celebrities, and companies, the project lays the groundwork for meeting the world where they are and assisting established businesses in their transition into the Fashion Metaverse. Space Runners’ goal in doing so is to become the largest provider of fashion items across the metaverse and games, regardless of their engines or blockchain.
“We view fashion as an integral aspect of digital identity, self-expression, and virtual culture in the metaverse. Fashion will be far more significant in the metaverse than it is in the physical world,” Deniz Ozgur, co-founder of Space Runners, explains.
Constructing a Metaverse of Fashion
Additionally, the top metaverse fashion brand announced a $10 million financing round headed by Polychain, Pantera Capital, Accel, Jump Capital, and additional investors, including Yat Siu, co-founder and Chairman of Animoca Brands, and Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch and Fractal.
Space Runners’ first collaboration was with NBA Champions Kyle Kuzma and Nick Young on an NFT sneaker series. These limited edition assets are intended to be worn in the metaverse, where they may be used to unlock qualities such as speed and power. Along with revolutionizing the way the world views fashion, each Space Runner NFT unlocked the ability to interact with players through special events, weekly courtside tickets at NBA games, and other backstage experiences. These benefits are in addition to those available to members, which include unlimited access to Solana’s (SOL) API services.
The December 2021 release consisted of 10,000 NFTs that sold out in less than nine minutes. Since then, Space Runners has fueled the growth of the world’s largest Solana NFT community, which now boasts 500,000 members across Discord, Twitter, and Instagram.
Foreshadowing a forthcoming industry-wide change, this debut collection showcased how fashion goods may be designed as NFTs and then integrated into any metaverse or game. Creators and artists would subsequently be able to use augmented reality (AR) and social media filters to enable NFT holders to engage with Space Runner assets outside of the metaverse, in a space where the digital and physical worlds intersect.
All efforts would then culminate in the debut of a metaverse game in 2022, ushering in a new era of fashion.
Into and beyond the metaverse
Space Runners intends to use the $10 million in finance to build its two core business lines – fashion goods and the fashion metaverse.
The Space Runners team is taking the required efforts to become the largest supplier of interoperable fashion items across NFT games and the larger metaverse for its fashion products. Simultaneously, their effort to create a fashion metaverse would gamify the industry through a concept known as “wear-to-earn.” Participants will be praised and rewarded for their fashion-forward thoughts in the digital realm under this paradigm.
Disclaimer: These are the writer’s opinions and should not be considered investment advice. Readers should do their own research.
