#205: These Nikes Are Made for Partnering

PLUS: 🔮 A VC firm predicts the future of Crypto

TPan has gone off the rails, what kind of title is that?

I know, I wanted to play on Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” 😅

Nike 🤝 EA SPORTS

Yesterday night, Nike’s Our Force 1 sale concluded. This fortunately meant I could stop refreshing the Our Force 1 contract 50 times a day. What can I say, I enjoy watching numbers go up.

If you want a better visualization of the Our Force 1 stats check out Sea Launch’s Dune dashboard. TLDR:

• 97,627 Our Force 1’s were minted out of the total 106,453 possible (92%)

• $1.93 million in revenue (97,627*$19.82)

• 52,971 minting addresses. This doesn’t mean there are 53k people who minted, because I know there are some people who had multiple .SWOOSH accounts.

• There were 3 waves of mint volume

  • First Access: For anyone who had an Our Force 1 poster NFT

  • General Access: Everyone with a .SWOOSH account

  • Nike SNKRS push notification

Source

• The distribution of OF1 boxes purchased was interesting, and I’ve added what I believe to be the logic for each of these cohorts:

  • 1: Accounts that wanted to simply participate (or possibly multi-account holders)

  • 2: Purchased 1 of each style: Classic Remix and New Wave.

  • 4: Accounts without an OF1 Poster that purchased the maximum quantity

  • 5: Accounts with an OF1 Poster that purchased the maximum quantity

Source

I’ll let you guess which group I fell under 😉

After the mint ended, .SWOOSH kept the community on its toes.

What was the announcement?

Source

Nice. Nike announced a new partnership with EA SPORTS to create virtual sports experiences in their video games:

• Select .SWOOSH virtual creations will be available in EA SPORTS titles

• More details about the integration will be shared in the coming months

As we await more details about the integration, we’re seeing a great example of interoperability.

Interoperability has been a concept that the industry has promoted for a while, and we’re seeing what this can look like in practice for web3.

What I think is happening here is a one-to-many application for both .SWOOSH and EA SPORTS. When I wrote about the concept of interoperability last year, I provided this example:

For EA, we’re seeing something like this:

On the other hand, we’re seeing something like this for Nike:

Outstanding questions remain for both sides:

• Can Nike’s virtual assets be utilized in different platforms, environments, and games? Eg: Can Our Force 1’s be worn in an EA Sports title and other games?

• Will EA SPORTS titles allow other brands to be worn alongside Nike, or is this an exclusive partnership? I imagine Adidas and Puma have similar efforts underway. If not, they will now lol.

• For both sides, this is a milestone in signaling. The partnership doors are open for business and I bet the DM’s and e-mail inboxes are popping off.

For more insights, Jonah has great takes from the gaming POV.

I’m looking forward to seeing what else Nike has up its sleeves. IMO, they’re off to a good start.

A Crypto Future by Compound Crypto

Compound Crypto, an early-stage Crypto VC fund, shared a piece exploring what the future of the space might look like over the next few years titled A Crypto Future. The team has invested in companies like Arbitrum, Compound, Dapper Labs, and The Graph.

Ooo, pretty!

This was an enjoyable read because it was less a Twitter thread and more like a story. Plus, I am partial to VC folks that can write 😉

What are some of the predictions for 2023 and 2024?

• DeFi crosses 30 million unique users (currently at ~8 million) thanks to KYC products and traditional institutions.

• Mobile wallet apps help to increase adoption and remove many of the UI challenges Crypto currently faces.

• Web3 gaming is not the killer use case because blockchains aren’t robust enough to support fully on-chain games, yet.

• The mass adoption unlock is due to user-friendly search tools that make it easier to explore on-chain. There will be ‘search buddies’ that integrate with on-chain data and wallets and quickly answer questions like ‘Show me the most popular NFTs over the last month’, or ‘Buy $100 of ETH for me over the next 2 hours’.

• Solana shows its dominance through gaming due to its focus on mobile.

• Polygon falls behind due to the lack of in-game throughput performance that Solana has. It ends up focusing on web2 brand partnerships and loyalty programs.

• Decentralized social apps still struggle for mass market adoption, but start finding the wedges for differentiation.

Read A Crypto Future in its entirety and see what they predict all the way out to 2026 👀

See you next week!