Actress Camila Cabello, lifestyle celebrity Paris Hilton and actress Priyanka Chopra are among the investors pumping another $65 million in avatar company Genies. All three will also become a Genies avatar themselves, possibly accompanied with an NFT collection of digital wearables.
CEO and founder Akash Nigam emphasized that Genies as a company wants to be very inclusive. In a tweet he stated that ‘Genies will be a female-first company, all the way from our cap table to our executives and everything in between’. From that perspective the investment of Paris Hilton, Camila Cabello and Priyanka Chopra makes a lot of sense.
For NFT connoisseurs the name of Paris Hilton won’t be a surprising one. Hilton has been in the news on several occasions this year, for example with her NFT drop on Nifty Gateway. With Camila Cabello and Priyanka Chopra, Paris Hilton is now at the forefront of digital avatars thanks to their investment in Genies.
Why investing in digital avatars makes sense
If there’s one thing the current game industry has thought investors, is that consumers are okay with spending money on in-game items. Epic Games built a multi-billion dollar game with Fortnite, which only makes money from selling wearables. League of Legends tells a similar story. At the same time Call of Duty and World of Warcraft have been selling expansions, season passes and other services.
At the same time Roblox has been a huge success recently, while Minecraft has been a household name in the industry for years now. Both games allow gamers to create content, make nice worlds of avatars: customize. What Genies is doing, is creating an avatar that people can use in multiple apps. Everybody will have their own avatar, and users can buy fashion items to dress up and look cool. Nowadays looking cool in the virtual world is just as important as looking cool in the real world. Your digital identity is more than just an avatar.
The rise of digital identities
The case of Genies isn’t isolated, as multiple companies are working on digital identities in the metaverse. Crypto Avatars has sold NFT-based, unique digital avatars that owners can use in for example Somnium Space and VR Chat. At the same time we wrote an article about Crucible, an organization that’s developing an SDK that connects gamers and game developers with the blockchain-powered metaverse.
Your digital identity is more than just your avatar, because it’s something that connects all your online activity together into one passport. It’s all about bringing the concept of identity into the digital world through data and visuals. A digital identity is definitely more than just an avatar and surely tells a lot more as well.
Everybody has developed online identities in the past twenty years. The avatar is the centralized point of attention, chosen by the user, to express themselves. It adds another layer of information to their online narrative. With the rise of digital ownership, the need to own your digital identity will only increase.
