DIGITALAX turns digital fashion into an on-chain supply chain with designer royalties

Ashton Addison: What is DIGITALAX, and what does the platform focus on?▶ 00:19

Emma-Jane MacKinnon-Lee: I like to describe DIGITALAX as a digital fashion operating system. It's very multifaceted, with lots of components. We started as an NFT marketplace for digital fashion, which launched around September last year. It let digital fashion designers upload their garments and designs as NFTs, and we've had over about 600k in sales to date. From there, the question was how you build a digital supply chain for digital fashion. We brought in concepts like fractional garment ownership and injected open source into the supply chain. The next stage was bridging this into application and utility, and gaming and esports are a big part of that. That's ESPA, the first indie and modded esports platform. Players buy skins on our marketplace and take them into different gaming, VR and 3D live content environments. They get a score on a leaderboard when they play, and they're paid out in our native cryptocurrency for getting on it.

Ashton: What makes your supply chain different for digital fashion?▶ 02:24

Emma-Jane: Digital fashion spawned out of sustainability. I think traditional physical fashion is the second most wasteful industry in the world, after oil, and there's a lot of exploitation in that supply chain. Digital fashion let designers experiment with styles, looks and textures at the prototyping stage without mocking up designs and throwing them out. It then moved into advertising, with digital fashion studios being hired by brands to make 3D models. When I started DIGITALAX, I was looking at it from the metaverse angle. Fashion is ubiquitous today, so it's an obvious parallel that digital fashion becomes ubiquitous in native digital environments. We wanted designers, brands and studios to be able to earn a livelihood from a career in digital fashion. We use the ERC-1155 and ERC-721 NFT standards to track the creation and design process on chain at a very modular level. Designers and creators can issue individual patterns, materials and textures as ERC-1155 NFTs. Another designer can pull from that open-source on-chain library and incorporate those pieces into a master garment. When the garment is sold, the contributors of the patterns, materials and textures get royalty distribution, under a new licensing model. We also pioneered the first ERC-998 variant contract, where an ERC-721 NFT owns a bundle of ERC-1155 NFTs that we assign to it based on the design. With that, we created the first multi-token bridge from layer 1 mainnet to the layer 2 Matic network and back.

Ashton: Who did you have in mind as the end user when you started building this?▶ 06:14

Emma-Jane: I'll be candid: it's been a challenge, because what we're building isn't a typical business model or project. We're building an entire ecosystem, and certain fundamental pillars have to be built for the implementation side to make sense. If we were just building a marketplace, it would focus on the speculative, purely cosmetic side of fashion. If we're going to pioneer the fashion industry and create economic value, jobs and livelihoods, the application side has to exist, so we can concentrate and drive market activity into these environments. There are a lot of stakeholders. On the fashion side, it's creators, designers, brands and studios. On the development side, it's modders, game developers, game studios and publication houses. Then there are the players, from amateur to pro. ESPA is about levelling players up from amateur to club pro, and skins are a key part of their identity and how they use them in our ecosystem. And because we're in crypto, there are also people who buy and hold the token for different reasons.

Ashton: How does the MONA token tie the ecosystem together, and does it make it sustainable for participants?▶ 09:02

Emma-Jane: MONA is the core ERC utility token of our platform, and it's a customized incentive for the entire ecosystem. People ask why we needed to build on Ethereum, or any chain, and why crypto, decentralization and Web3. Apart from it being the future, the amazing thing I find about crypto is the whole idea of programmable incentives. You can customize the incentives and the liquidity for an ecosystem, and drive sustainability across all the market participants. MONA is the purchasing power on our marketplace. Players use it to buy skins, and it's also distributed as the income stream to the designers uploading fashion and to the developers and modders who take our skins and garments into their games and accept them in the esports tournaments. The other layer is governance. MONA has governance rights within ESPA and DIGITALAX, and we're on a path towards progressive decentralization. Because we're pioneering so many pillars, we can't just throw the private keys away and tell everyone to come in and vote. We have to keep a stronger roadmap, so that eventually the whole ecosystem reaches an equilibrium between designers, developers and players.

Ashton: How does ESPA work for indie developers and modders, and why build it this way?▶ 11:43

Emma-Jane: A big challenge people don't always see is that the gaming and 3D content industries are very siloed. There are a lot of walled gardens, and you can't just take your content into different environments. That's a barrier at the business layer and also a technical interoperability problem. So we asked how we could create a layer of utility that incentivizes indie games, developers, modders and studios to plug into our ecosystem. They get access to Web3, decentralization, NFTs and blockchain, and they benefit from the security and future-proofing, without changing all their code or building on Ethereum or another blockchain. We didn't want to come in and say "you've got to accept this". Instead we built an additional layer on top of the current in-game economy. ESPA is focused on indie developers and the modding ecosystem, because that's where we see the future going, and it supports the unseen creators in the space. We partner with indie developers and modders, who plug into our SDK. That lets us track players' leaderboard scores in game. Players are authenticated through the NFT skins they buy from our marketplace, and the developers accepting that content get paid from the distribution of marketplace profits.

Ashton: Where are you now, and what comes next for the platform?▶ 14:25

Emma-Jane: There's a lot going on. We're constantly upgrading the marketplace and how it ties into ESPA, and we're partnering with a lot of new content and games. We ran Among Us mods about a month ago and had 171k, which was super exciting because it changed the lives of a lot of the designers, devs and modders involved. Having that impact on people is a huge part of what we do. Minecraft is coming up, along with Roblox, CS:GO mods and League of Legends mods. We're also building up the fashion onboarding side, because a huge part of this is bridging the traditional fashion industry into digital fashion and into hybrid digital-physical realms. If you're a bigger brand like Fendi or Ralph Lauren, it doesn't make sense to pack up all your resources and come in. Brands and developers need to know their roadmap to a proper, sustainable livelihood and where the market is that they're addressing. So we're focused on being a core infrastructure and protocol layer for fashion and gaming and how they intersect. We're launching our first hybrid digital-physical NFT fashion line in a few days. In about two weeks we're also launching a content magazine platform with NFT subscriptions, which bigger brands we partner with can use to distribute their goods.