Digital Twin at Paris ETH CC 🇫🇷, Fashion NFTs 🦄 & Sneaker Collabs 👟

Welcome to Digital Twin, we help you get a little smarter about the NFT market and its impact on the future of fashion, commerce, and culture.

In This Week's Roundup:

• 🇫🇷Recap of Paris Ethereum Community Conference

• 👟Balmain Unicorn x Jeff Cole NFTs

• 🇮🇹Salvatore Ferragamo's NFT Booth

Didn't go to ETH CC??... Here's what you need to know:

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin spoke about the longer-term future of the network to attendees at the annual EthCC in Paris on Thursday.

The Ethereum protocol is undergoing a long & complicated transition toward becoming a much more robust and powerful system.

Key Quotes from Vitalik Showcase the Collosal Untapped Potential of ETH:

"The difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum is that Bitcoiners consider Bitcoin to be 80% complete, but Ethereans consider Ethereum to be 40% complete...55% after the merge" - Vitalik Buterin

"Today, ETH can process 15-20 transactions a second...at the end of this road map, Ethereum will be a much more scalable system. By the end, Ethereum will be able to process 100,000 transactions per second" - Vitalik Buterin 

The 5 Key Stages for Ethereum:

 1 - The Merge: full transition to proof of stake (Date currently set for September 19th, 2022)

- ETH operates under the Proof of Work (POW) consensus, meaning miners must validate transactions... however, it is transitioning to Proof of Stake (POS).

 What does proof of stake mean? Simply put, the proof-of-stake model allows owners of a cryptocurrency to stake coins and create their own validator nodes.

-What is staking? Staking is when you pledge your coins to be used for verifying transactions. Your coins are locked up while you stake them, but you can unstake them if you want to trade them. Mining will no longer be the means of producing valid blocks. Instead, the proof-of-stake validators assume this role and will be responsible for processing the validity of all transactions and proposing blocks. Staking will take Ether out of the market, which could increase the value of Ether that's left trading.

-The Merge will also reduce Ethereum's energy consumption by approximately 99.95%. Not only will the merge make ETH more efficient and sustainable, it will also increase the blockchain security and scalability.

2 - The Surge: massive scalability increases for rollups through sharding (2023)

- The introduction of sharding on Ethereum. What is sharding?? Sharding splits a blockchain's entire network into smaller partitions, known as "shards". This will significantly increase the network's scalability.

 3 - The Verge: statelessness through Verkle trees and related features

- Verkle trees are a "powerful upgrade to Merkle proofs that allow for much smaller proof sizes". This will optimize storage on Ethereum and help reduce node size.

 4 - The Purge: eliminating historical data and technical debt

- This will reduce the hard drive space needed for validators. This eliminates historical data and bad debt. It also streamlines storage, which in turn reduces network congestion.

5 - The Splurge: miscellaneous but important extras

- The splurge includes a series of miscellaneous *smaller* upgrades which ensure the network runs smoothly following the prior 4 stages

Ultimately, we are seeing institutional investor sentiment improve as the merge approaches. At the time of writing, ETH is currently trading up 30.8% in the past month.

Up Next, Let's Talk Fashion NFTs: Balmain Unicorn x Jeff Cole

Founded 75 years ago by Pierre Balmain, the fashion house has always stood out for its originality and non-conformism in its collections. This has become even more prevalent with Rousteing, the current creative director who is very attentive to new technological innovations.

NFT Overview: Balmain partnered with animator and digital artist Jeff Cole to create three video NFTs. Cole's NFT videos show a Unicorn morphing into an equine shape, as it cycles through black-and-white, gold-and-white, and multi-color tonal mixes, echoing the three colorways that will make up the sneaker's first drop.

NFT Utility: In addition to the Balmain Unicorn x Jeff Cole NFTs, the three winning bidders will also receive items of rare value:

• Pair of Unicorn sneakers signed by Olivier Rousteing

• Invitations for two to experience the Balmain Festival in September

• Airdrops of the most recent Balmain Nonfungible Thread NFTs

• Technical sketch of the Unicorn signed by Safa Sahin, head of Balmain's sneaker design team

👇Checkout the behind the scenes creative process of Jeff Cole's Unicorn sneaker

Salvatore Ferragamo Opens Ethereum NFT Booth in NYC

Salvatore Ferragamo opened a new concept store in the Soho district of New York City. Ferragamo installed an NFT booth where customers could create and mint their own Ethereum NFTs from a menu of traits. All of the NFTs created at the Ferragamo booth were free to visitors, but only 256 could be minted in total. Ferragamo called its NFT booth a "multi-sensory" experience that "blends the worlds of web3 and in-person retail". Ferragamo partnered with artist Shxpir to create the traits and visual elements for its NFTs. Shxpir created psychedelic, 3D digital art and also designed a limited-edition capsule collection of physical items for Ferragamo consisting of 200 t-shirts and 150 sweatshirts.

Incorporating NFTs into physical store experiences is a method being explored by many brands. Selfridges displayed and sold NFTs in its London Store, Fred Segal displayed an NFT collection in LA. Philip Plein has an NFT gallery in a new store in London.

Those that are here now will benefit greatly for being early as long as they have strong conviction plays. If you are a brand and want to start building click the connect button below. We are looking to support forward thinking brands at the intersection of fashion and Web3!

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