A few weeks ago I asked the community for a list of creators who are making merch, content and lore around their CloneX IP. My goal was to see who is actively propelling the RTFKT/CloneX ecosystem *beyond* what the core team was doing…the results are astonishing.

I’m pleased to present Volume 1 of the CloneX Ecosystem Map, a collection of the builders who are propelling this community forward. This comes after weeks of studying, interacting and immersing myself within the CloneX community and I feel is pretty good representation of community at large. PLEASE if I left anyone out, I’d love to capture everyone who’s involved within the space, but there are a few criteria I put in place for categorization and filtering purposes:

1st: You must use a CloneX as your PFP (a majority of the time)

2nd: You must not be on the official RTFKT / Nike team (the idea here is to go beyond the core team)

3rd: Your work needs to be directly contributing to the CloneX ecosystem (for instance, I wouldn’t count an artist who made a one off painting of a clone that someone requested to be commissioned as someone “building” for the community. That changes if said artist’s purpose for the account was to commission 1 of 1 paintings for Clones. In that case, of course they would be included here…and I welcome it!!)

Now let’s go into the categories:

Artists: Digital or Physical. Artists were an easy one to capture since there are so many, the hair splitting comes as I had to bifurcate between either digital or physical. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive per se, but I needed some way to recognize @AntbenBen’s amazing T-Shirt work and the factory that @SwooshieNFT is building. For those reasons, I decided to make them 2 distinct categories. If course, if you’d like to be moved, LMK.

Music & Media: these are the people like @VegaGenesisTM who are building at the intersection of music & their clone. This dude rigged a whole set up and had his clone spit bars on the track linked here.

News: are those who are covering the community, thinking outside of the box and giving newcomers a way to immerse themselves into the space. If you’re interested in anything RTFKT but don’t know where to start, I highly recommend giving @RTFKTcreators & @clonespiracys a follow. If you have time, be sure to join into the Clonespiracy spaces every Monday at 5PM PST, they’re awesome.

Ecosystem Lore: lots of really cool side projects and IP are being built out here. I feel like the CloneX brand gives way to a ton of different verticals to explore especially within anime, street and the fashion verticals. This is an area of community lead creation I’d love to see grow. Shoutout to @CloneXRamenShop & @TastuAdjaye on their pioneering work.

Adjacent Projects: These are derivative projects that use elements from the base CloneX to either their own spin on it as in the case with the @johnnyx_nft project or cross collabs as in the case with @coolXclones. 

All 6 of these subcategories make up the “knitting” of the RTFKT / CloneX Ecosystem that is so special to this community and truly only rivaled to that of BAYC - and that’s something that a lot of projects aspire to but struggle to attain over time. 

I hope there are a TON more additions to the list by the time Volume 2 comes out and we 100x this community lead effort by next year. I have a list in a Google Doc (linked here) which anyone can check out and comment to add themselves or anyone I missed.