Zora is turning culture into tokens
How products like ZORA might change the crypto game for brands
Along with personal tokens, decentralized clothing brands have only recently been growing despite being written about for a few years. The reason that both categories have only started to pick up traction is because of Uniswap.
The origin of Saint Fame, the world’s first decentralized clothing brand
Unisocks was the first example of a “$HYPE” physical good being tokenized and sold using Uniswap. It was created by the Uniswap team to show off the potential for new use cases inside of Uniswap.
Saint FAME quickly followed with a decentralized clothing brand, except with the added primitive of using a DAO to determine how the goods should be created.
The $HYPE good model using Uniswap has a number of benefits:
Secondary sale revenue for brands - sneaker marketplaces leave a ton of revenue on the table while destroying scarcity (marketplaces have fake sneakers)
Market driven price discovery - pricing physical merchandise is difficult for many creators & brands who try to price in culture to merchandise
Speculative kickstarter - crowdfund a project with Uniswap pool shares before production
Fractional ownership - similarly to Otis, you can invest in limited-edition scarce goods without having to pay for the full product
Tracking the past & future of Saint FAME
Saint Fame has seen some success to-date with a rise in $FAME, but it’s unclear if the demand of $HYPE goods can maintain their value. Saint Fame has also introduced a secondary token which incentivizes holders of $FAME to redeem their tokens and lower the supply, enabling the token to maintain its price post-manufacturing.
The combination of NFTs and physical merchandise ties additional value to the original token. This creates the interesting scenario in that as the number of potential “wearable” NFTs increase and become more popular (Decentraland, Ethmoji, CryptoVoxels), the design space for physical brands to intersect with the digital world widens.
The question remains: At what point does the demand for digital wearables with predefined scarcity surpass the demand for physical goods?
Introducing ZORA, the marketplace for limited-edition goods
Saint Fame was just the beginning. The Zora team is building out a marketplace that facilitates the trading of $HYPE goods similar to Saint Fame. In the beginning of Zora, it will be limited to limited-edition physical goods like Saint Fame—but the vision of Zora expands much more than that: culture. From the Zora website:
Like any community on the internet, internet-owned organizations can scale to billions of people. Unlike communities on the internet, internet-owned organizations can potentially scale to billions in capital. It aligns incentives for creators and their community by giving them real ownership in their creativity.
We want to help anyone in the world create their own internet-owned brands.
Think internet-owned:
• Fashion Houses
• Record Labels
• Production Studios
• Art Houses
• Festivals
• ∆$≥0
Zora is the first example of a project using an existing public-good primitive to bring a physical brand to life. Who’s next?
Further reading on this topic:
NFTY #50: physical scarcity
Decentralizing the minting of NFTs
NFTY #47: Cryptokicks
If you are working on trying to get more people using crypto applications, I would love to talk about how I can help. Reach out to me on twitter @flynnjamm, my DMs are always open.