Today, cryptocurrencies are everywhere. With their hyped appeal, they seem to have taken over the hearts and minds of many. But are they really the next big thing?
The fashion industry is a field that always takes pride in being ahead of the game, always with one foot in the next season. Therefore, it did not come as a big surprise when the field was one of the very early adaptors of new cryptocurrencies. There are already a few fashion-specific coins out there and big media names such as Fashion TV are even taking a variety of cryptocurrencies from their advertisers.
In Vilnius, Lithuania, there is even a physical store where people can pay with money from their digital wallets. All these things go to show that the people who shape the fashion industry have a strong faith in the power these currencies will have in the future.
And that’s the state of cryptocurrencies for now. After the huge success of bitcoin, more and more people have released their own currencies, which, as it was economically expected, decreased their real value. But this should not mean that all cryptocurrencies will be worthless in the future. The contrary might be just the opposite. While many of these currencies are most likely to crumble and disappear, it is likely that there will be a few that will have tremendous success. In order to gain power, there are even conferences on fashion and blockchain that are organized (last year, such a conference was held during the Blockchain Fashion Week in Kiev, Ukraine).
While there is not a very strong demand for digital coins at the moment in the fashion industry, the technologies behind it, such as blockchian technology are more and more used in the field. For example, there is more and more discussion about integrating blockchain technologies in the labels of clothing in order to provide the customers with the reassurance that the items they bought are authentic. Furthermore, the idea of providing customers with information on where and how their clothing was made is also one that is seems to be of great interest to both manufacturers and customers.
With the rise of newer technologies such as the Internet of Things – which can be seen very well in fashion items such as the smartwatch, what today seems a bit alien and unpractical will become extremely handy and approachable in the near future. With the Google glasses and smartwatches, the fashion world placed itself once again ahead of the game.
At the moment, cryptocurrencies are not centralized (given that that’s the idea behind them) and are not strongly regulated by governments or banks. Many organizations and people who develop such coins have a hard time with the legal aspects or simply with the trust aspect of the process. However, this can be just a matter of time. It is very likely that the future will bring a great economical shift, where such currencies will become established. Once this will happen, it is most probable that they will become regulated, which will mean that many people will gain trust in them. There are of course also people who hope that decentralized currencies will lead to a decrease in state control over currencies, but that is not very likely to happen.
“The Future is Cryptocurrency” said a Fashion TV commercial and they might be right. Just as people transitioned from horses and carriages to cars and from classic TV channels to smart TV apps, so will we transition from classic money to digital money and look back at the times when we carried metal coins with us as an unnecessary oddity.
Fraquoh and Franchomme
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