Reebok is working on a “digital shoe experience” called Reebok Impact, for release sometime next year. The product here is digital wearables for metaverse avatars – that is, NFTs on a blockchain.

The teaser video, however, is promising that “the experiences you share” in the metaverse will “become the digital sneakers you wear.” Do the digital sneakers somehow record your in-verse history? We’ll have to wait and see.

Reebok’s original entry into the market for NFTs dates to April 2001, when it minted 200 and sold them through the Wax blockchain.

Behind this new project’s technical aspects is a company called Futureverse, founded in 2022 and headquartered in New Zealand. Earlier this year, Futureverse undertook a Series A round of funding, raising $54 million from 10T Holdings and Ripple, and shortly thereafter tied into Alibaba’s cloud.

Futureverse is a proponent of the open metaverse – for which a partner firm, Fluf, will be presenting a manifesto at the next South by Southwest (SXSW) conference and festival, scheduled for March 8-16, 2024, in Austin, Texas. The open metaverse, according to Futureverse, is grounded in two principles: immersion into a single world, where the boundaries are lifted between finance, gaming, social media, commerce and so forth; and ownership, where open source code and open standards give users full control of their assets and enable them to “move freely between applications.”

As Futureverse insists, “No one can build ‘A Metaverse.’ There is only ‘The Metaverse,’ the collection of user-owned assets that exist, and a collection of interoperable applications. Each participant can only build an app, a metaworld, or a piece of content. Anyone saying they are building ‘A Metaverse’ misunderstands its core principles.”

The metaverses whose dealings with other sports brands we have been reporting on – Roblox, The Sandbox, et al. – should, by these definitions, be called metaworlds, because they fall short of this universality. The idea of the open metaverse is to be single and all-encompassing. The wearer of Reebok digital sneakers should be able to wander the lands of Adidas and Nike the way a customer can enter any physical store while wearing any brand’s shoes.

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