April Recap: Fashion NFTs News & Alpha

May 04, 2022

The Yuga Labs Minting Debacle

The Yuga Labs Otherside land mint spiked transaction gas fees to 4000-6000 Gwei for the entirety of the few hour mint. $250M worth of Ethereum was burnt as fees. The Otherside mint failure saw the Twitter community rally for better smart contract optimizations.

We highlighted some of these solutions in the chart below.

The RTFKT x Nike MNLTH Drop

On April 22nd the RTFKT MNLTH, which was airdropped to Clone X holders, revealed virtual sneakers in collaboration with Nike. While there are still some questions surrounding the sneakers, e.g. whether they will be forgeable (likely), we know that the sneakers are meant to evolve over time and will likely interact with other sneaker types in accordance with the Nike CryptoKicks patent.

More information below:

In addition to virtual sneakers, RTFKT has been teasing Clone X phygical (physical/digital) wearables on Twitter.

Adidas — The Journey Into the Metaverse Begins

Burn “Into the Metaverse” NFT (Phase 1) to claim physical Adidas merch. Once merch is claimed, you are airdropped the Phase 2 NFT. Phase 2 will lead holders into the metaverse. Their new PFP collection Ozworld will likely play a role.

ZARA - Launches a Metaverse Collection Lime Glam

Coachella x FTX Partnership — The Cereal Box Strategy

Each Coachella wristband holder was airdropped a Seed NFT. For many, this was their introduction to actually holding NFTs.

This reminded us of the good old cereal box strategy back in the days whereby a CD (e.g. game) was included in the cereal box. Back then, this complimentary CD was the introduction to gaming for many kids. The FTX strategy could work in a very similar way.

The Fabricant airdropped outfits to World of Women collection holder

This is a natural step for “faceless” digital fashion brands. As we wrote earlier in the month, the biggest competitors for digital fashion brands are PFP projects.

PFPs themselves are a type of fashion; they reveal your taste, your values, your community. In a virtual setting, such as the oh-so-famous metaverse, branding and storytelling is everything. So far, it has been easier to accomplish this via PFPs. In some ways, PFPs are the brand logos.

After all, Nike wouldn’t be Nike without Michael Jordan or Lebron James.

Other News

Hypebeast got into phygical NFT collectibles in partnership with Karafuru and Atmos
Louis Vuitton to release new in-game NFTs
A new NFT token standard ERC721R was released on April 11th: Prevents Rug Pulls
Forbes creates a PFP collection
Tiffany & Co. introduces a diamond Crypto Punk keychain
Reddit incorporates Ethereum NFTs
Prada getting deeper into digital fashion via monthly exclusive digital drops (non-NFT)
Hypebeast getting into NFT collectibles. Likely involving phygical (physical/digital) collectibles.

April Alpha:

With countless NFT collections launching each day, it’s important for new NFT projects to answer the question “How will we provide value to our holders?” While value is a relatively subjective concept, different types of NFTs should think about different value release mechanisms (as seen below).

Monetizing NFTs — Mint vs. Secondary Sales

Inspired by the high mint price of Moonbirds, we decided to examine the monetization strategy of the top five PFP collections based on revenue from mint and revenue from secondary sales. The results we found are in the chart below.