Metaverse Fashion Week in Decentraland
Metaverse Fashion Week in Decentraland
Hello and welcome to MadeMeThink! Once a week I send out this newsletter with curated content, events and examples that have sparked my interest. It's a review of my last 7-days in Web3, NFTs and the Metaverse. Want to follow my thoughts on a daily basis? Then connect with me via Linkedin and Twitter. This article is also available in German.
Decentraland is besides Sandbox one of the big players for virtual worlds (hello Second Life!). Often Decentraland is mentioned as one of the important Metaverse projects. But what is Decentraland anyway and what do virtual experiences look like that can be built on it?
Metaverse Fashion Week
A little over a week ago, I attended Metaverse Fashion Week in Decentraland and took a few recordings of my visit for you. There were a number of virtual events taking place as part of Metaverse Fashion Week. Via the Decentraland website you can view all current events and enter an event with one click via your Web3 wallet (e.g. MetaMask). This is exactly what I did for you.
Since it's Metaverse Fashion Week, I thought I should check out a virtual catwalk. And this is what a virtual catwalk looks like on Decentraland....
The virtual catwalk was okay in terms of experience, but didn't excite me much. On Vogue I found an interesting comment about Metaverse Fashion Week:
"The future looks like the past" commented Kerry Murphy, co-founder of digital fashion house The Fabricant, which created the first NFT dress ever sold. But, he added, while the user experience is "from the '90s", development is speeding up and will be better next year. (Source: Vogue)
The user experience is indeed still in need of improvement. Decentraland is also still really at the beginning of its journey. There is no mobile client yet, no VR, since recently a desktop client for Windows, but not yet for Mac... so there is still a lot to come. I tried to get official user numbers for Decentraland, wrote mails and many Discord messages to the Decentraland team. Unfortunately nobody official answered me. Then one user sent me this data link and wrote that he has been watching this data around the clock for weeks and the user numbers are mostly in the range of 2k active users (the number at the bottom left of the listing). 2k users is of course little, maybe that's why I didn't get any official feedback from Decentraland.
Anyway, Vogue reported that Metaverse Fashion Week attracted 108k unique visitors. Unfortunately, there is no information about how much of the virtual fashion / wearables were sold. But that fashion is a topic in virtual worlds is obvious to everyone who moves around in it a while. Here is a screenshot of a party I attended during Fashion Week. With my standard black outfit I was a bit out of line.
Clothing for virtual worlds, so-called wearables, can be purchased via a marketplace on Decentraland in the in-house cryptocurrency MANA. For example, I could buy a hoodie for 10 mana, which is about 22 euros (1 mana = 2.22 euros according to Coingecko).
On Decentraland you can also buy really virtual land. The floor price, that is the price for the cheapest piece of land available, is currently 3.186 ETH on OpenSea, which means almost 10,000 Euro.
But investment put aside. More than land on Decentraland, I was interested in the party on Decentraland. Since I haven't been to a party in a long time due to Covid, I went dancing a bit as a first step ;)
If you've read this far, you're probably interested in the topic. The best thing to do now is to explore Decentraland on your own. Get yourself a Metamask wallet and wander through Decentraland for a while. It doesn't cost anything and is quite funny. And send me a screenshot of one of your experiences :)
—
Disclaimer: The thoughts published in this publication are my personal opinions and should not be viewed as investment advice. I am not a financial expert. My specialty is entrepreneurship, innovation & marketing. Readers should always do their own research. I own various cryptocurrencies and NFTs, however in many cases it is for the sake of researching the field and gaining a deeper understanding of Web3, NFTs and the Metaverse and not for investment purposes.