In brief
Adidas has partnered with Coinbase and The Sandbox.
A Coinbase spokesperson said the Coinbase deal is part of Adidas’s metaverse push.
Adidas currently has a parcel of land allocated to it in The Sandbox.
Sportswear giant Adidas set crypto Twitter ablaze on Wednesday evening with an announcement: “We’ve partnered with Coinbase”, before disingenuously concluding the tweet with a crypto meme reference; it’s “probably nothing”.
No-coiners take note: institutional adoption of crypto is growing. Sure, Tesla owners may be a niche crowd, and who outside of Dallas supports the Mavericks? But everyone and their auntie owns a piece of Adidas, so a partnership with Coinbase clearly is probably something, given the other major bit of news this week that Adidas is also building a presence in the metaverse.
On Tuesday, the official Twitter account for Animoca’s open-world blockchain game The Sandbox addressed a tweet to Adidas. It read: “Hey @adidasoriginals, impossible is nothing in the Metaverse. What if we invite all of the original thinkers and do-ers to design our future together?”
The tweet contained a link directing curious clickers to the coordinates of a parcel of in-game land in the game that has apparently been earmarked for Adidas Originals. It is unclear whether the land was purchased by Adidas or given to it.
Given the facts, Wednesday’s announcement is not nothing. But are the two connected? Probably…
A spokesman for Adidas told CityAM on Thursday that the Coinbase partnership is part of Adidas’s strategy to gain a foothold in the metaverse. The spokesman said: “The Metaverse is currently one of the most exciting developments in digital, making it an interesting platform for Adidas”.
So where does The Sandbox come into it? Will we see an in-game shopping city filled with tokenized Adidas wearables soon? And what role does Coinbase play? The details are thin, but Adidas’s competitors are making similar moves towards the metaverse.
At the end of last month, Facebook announced it was rebranding to Meta and embracing NFTs in order to get a headstart on the Metaverse. Barely a week later, Nike filed four requests to trademark “virtual goods” with the US. Patent and Trademark Office. The filings allegedly list various digital goods, including headwear, eyewear, bags, backpacks, and sports equipment.
It looks like the IRL sneaker wars could migrate into virtual reality soon…
It’s impossible to say more about Adidas’s metaverse push at this juncture; despite the obscene amount of money Adidas has spent over the years on ad campaigns and sloganeers, impossible isn’t nothing.
