Gucci formed a partnership with the creators of the NFT Bored Ape Yacht Club series
Despite the decline in interest in NFT and meta universes in 2022, the fashion house still sees them as opportunities to expand audiences and generate revenue
Gucci has entered into a multi-year partnership with Web3 developers Yuga Labs, Business of Fashion (BoF) reports. The fashion brand will expand its presence in the Otherside meta-universe from the authors of leading NFT collections.
Yuga Labs was founded in 2021 and created the NFT-collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), one of the most successful NFT projects. It later acquired the rights to the CryptoPunks token series, Meebits, and the 10KTF digital marketplace. It also runs Otherside, a gaming meta-universe based on the BAYC collection. Last March, Yuga Labs raised $450 million at a valuation of $4 billion.
The Gucci and Yuga Labs collaboration aimed to increase interaction between the companies' audiences by "exploring the intersection of the fashion and entertainment industries in the Metaworld." Gucci's activities in the virtual world of Otherside will begin as early as the end of March.
The fashion brand has already collaborated with the 10KTF marketplace in 2022 on the Gucci Grail project, in which 10KTF's "digital master" Vagmi-san created clothing and accessories used to personalize NFTs designed by Alessandro Michele, Gucci's creative director at the time.
According to Gucci Vault & Metaverse Ventures CEO Robert Trifus, despite the decline in interest in the NFT field in 2022, the company still sees it as a long-term opportunity to strengthen the community, encourage customer loyalty and generate revenue. He said Gucci would leverage the expertise of content creators in the NFT and meta-universe space through a variety of strategic partnerships.
Yuga Labs initially issued and sold its tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. In early 2023, following the launch of the Ordinals protocol, which allowed NFT operations on the bitcoin network, the first NFT collection uploaded to the BTC blockchain was Bitcoin Punks, the original Cryptopunks in the Ethereum blockchain from Yuga Labs. The maximum selling price of NFTs from this collection reached 9.5 BTC (about $222 thousand).
In February, Yuga Labs announced the creation of a series of NFTs in the bitcoin network of 300 items called TwelveFold. The developers raised almost $16.5 million from the sale of this collection during the auction.
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