About two weeks after establishing partnerships with the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and the networked-gaming platform The Sandbox, Adidas has announced by tweet three new partners in its foray into the so-called metaverse. One is Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), a collection of about 10,000 Bored Ape non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Ethereum blockchain, each of which doubles as a Yacht Club membership card and grants access to members-only benefits. Gmoney, another producer of Ethereum-based NFTs, describes itself on Twitter as a “futurist. disruptor. ape.” Finally, there is PUNKS comic, a series of comic-book Ethereum NFTs (on the open ERC-721 standard) created by Pixel Vault. The comic “chronicles Beanie’s journey – from humble auction house busboy to digital art kingpin.” The first issue, sold out, is now available only on the secondary market. The second one, as Adidas has tweeted, is forthcoming.

While its overall strategy remains undisclosed, the sportswear giant seems to be embracing a particular flavor of crypto. Like Bitcoin, Ethereum operates on a blockchain, but it has a computer-programming dimension that goes beyond electronic currency. According to its own website, Ethereum “builds on Bitcoin” and has “some big differences.” It can be used for “lots of different digital assets – even Bitcoin,” which makes it a “marketplace of financial services, games and apps that can’t steal your data or censor you.” It is notable also for its implementation of smart contracts, which execute automatically on the blockchain. The smart contract was defined in 1996 by Nick Szabo as a “set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises.”

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