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2 Days ago
Tommy Higfiler Announces 1st Multi-metaverse Hub
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Lifestyle brand Tommy Higfiler announced its first-ever decentralized presence, creating a multi-metaverse hub in preparation for the Decentraland’s Metaverse Fashion Week (MVFW23), which started on March 28 and till March 31.

Tommy Higfiler’s multi-metaverse hub will be premiered on various metaverse platforms, including Decentraland, Roblox, Spatial, DressX and Ready Player Me as it will open a connection within Decentraland to other metaverse platforms to see how the users will respond when they access the same brand from various platforms, according to The Vogue.

The hub, which will offer an end-to-end shopping journey for consumers, is structured to be similar to the famous TH monogram. It will feature digital fashion, artworks for Vinnie Hagar, NFTs, AR Features, and a photo booth, in addition to gaming and community-focused competition to create AI fashion.

It is created by the virtual reality platform Emperia, which earlier worked for brands such as Lacoste, Ralph Loren, and Dior Beauty.

In this regard, CEO of Emepria Olga Dogadkina said: “Metaverse retail experiences have the potential to solve user experience, data analysis, and online engagement issues retailers have been struggling with from the inception of e-commerce.”

“The new Tommy Hilfiger hub brings together all platforms and centralizes virtual and physical, allowing for easy transition between platforms and enabling the direct sale of goods, both physical and virtual, with one simple checkout process,” Dogadkina added.

MVFW23 will feature the Spring/Summer Fashion season on virtual catwalks. In addition, a special experience developed by Miami Fashion Week will take part in the event.

Curated by NFT marketplace UNXD, MVFW23 participants will be selected by an advisory team formed by Decentraland. The advisory team includes experts from digital fashion houses, including The Fabricant, Institute of Digital Fashion, Fashion3 by MAD Global, and House of Web3. The participating brands will be announced in January.

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3 Days ago
Disney Reportedly Shuts down Metaverse Division
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Entertainment giant Disney reportedly decided to abandon its metaverse division as a part of its wider restructuring plan to cut its operating expenses by $5.5 billion and lay off 7,000 employees within the coming two months.

The news was circulated by the Wall Street Journal, which quoted people familiar with the matter as saying, who pointed out that the employment contracts of the metaverse division’s 50 employees will not be renewed, except for Michael White, who led the broader consumer-products unit, according to Forbes.

In February 2022, Disney created its metaverse division in an attempt to look for new ways to attract the attention of the next generations of audience and cope with the tech companies’ trend to the metaverse like Meta.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Disney’s decision to close the metaverse division and cut operating expenses came after a consultation with McKinsey & Co to find cost-cutting opportunities. The two main reasons for Disney’s move are the growing competition in the streaming sector and the discouraging economic conditions.

Earlier, Disney’s former and current chief executives, Bob Chapek and Robert Iger, believed that they were looking at the metaverse as a very bullish investment opportunity. Chapek described the metaverse as the next great storytelling frontier as he was so optimistic about the company’s future in the virtual space.

A metaverse is a network of three-dimensional virtual environments focusing on social interaction. It may be characterized as a digitally simulated world. It utilizes blockchain, augmented reality, and virtual reality (VR), combined with social media principles, to develop venues for extensive user communication that imitate the real world.

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5 Days ago
Volume of NFT Trading Reached $311 Mln in Q1, Report Says
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The volume of NFT trading has skyrocketed over the first quarter of this year, a report issued by DappRadar showed, reaching $311 million so far. 

DappRadar pointed out that $417.5 million was invested into blockchain gaming and metaverse projects in Q1 2023 in light of the increasing popularity of virtual worlds and NFTs, according to Coindesk.

Virtual land trading reached record levels in the past quarter, hitting 147,000 trades. This increase occurred because of the growing virtual land trading on platforms such as Yuga Labs’ Otherside and MG Land

As for the NFTs, Otherdeed NFTs, which are linked to the Otherside metaverse, saw an unprecedented boom in trading volume as they went up 237% compared to the previous quarter, recording $222 million. An Otherdeed NFT was the highest recorded sale for virtual land in the last quarter as it was sold for 186 ETH (about $2.85 million at the time). 

Yuga Labs’s announcement of details for the second test of its gamified Otherside metaverse platform could be a reason for this hike, Sara Gherghelas, a blockchain analyst at DappRadar, suggested. Gherghelas pointed out that NFT marketplace Blur’s “airdrop seasons and farming” could be another reason for this increase in the trading volume. 

Other virtual worlds, such as The Sandbox, Decentraland, and Axie Infinity, were also among the top decentralized apps (dapps) last quarter. However, outlandish Createra Genesis Land became one of the top virtual world dapp in terms of trading volume that hit $14 million. In January 2023, Createra Genesis Land raised $10 million in funding and focuses on enabling user-generated metaverse creations.

Moreover, the number of unique active wallets on Decentraland grew over the last week due to Decentraland’s upcoming Metaverse Fashion Week. The expected event also bolstered the trading volume on the platform by 63%.

It is worth mentioning that NFT sales in 2022 hit 101 million last year, an increase of 67.57% from the year before. 

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Animoca Brands
5 Days ago
Animoca Brands Denies Cutting $200 Mln of Its Metaverse Fund
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Animoca Brands, a prominent Web3 investor and blockchain game developer, recently dismissed rumors about its intention to cut the money allocated to its metaverse fund by 20%, according to Cointelegraph.

A report published by Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, claimed that Animoca Brands scaled back its metaverse fund target by 20% to $800 instead of $2 billion due to the fluctuations in the crypto market and instability in the banking sector.

In a statement, Animoca noted: “The claim that the Animoca Capital fund target was ‘cut’ from $2 billion to $1 billion is not correct, because $1 billion has always been within the range declared.”

The NFT and gaming investor also denied that the metaverse fund’s valuation has dropped from $6 billion in July 2022 to roughly $2 billion in March 2023.

Earlier in November, Animoca’s Co-founder and Executive Chairman Yat Siu announced his company’s plans to set up a fund worth $2 billion to invest in metaverse-related activities as the target size would be between $1 billion and $2 billion depending on how much was raised.

The firm has already admitted that the instability in the banking scene in the United States has a negative impact on the available venture capital, however, it stressed that the final amount of its metaverse fund had been determined without changes, adding it will inform the public about “with the appropriate details, including the final size of this fund.”

Commenting on the rumors which were given by unnamed sources, Siu told Cointelegraph “this makes it difficult to ascertain exactly who or what the sources and agenda are, which is unfortunate.”

Earlier in March, Saudi leading games production company Manga Productions inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Animoca Brands to build a strategic partnership through which they can develop Web3 initiatives and enhance the blockchain industry in the region. The partnership will showcase Mango’s content and characters in the Web3 ecosystem and develop Web3 pilot projects across Animoca’s extensive ecosystem to utilize Manga Productions’ high-quality content portfolio.

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