Puma has established a sequel to its original metaverse. Black Station made its debut in September of last year as part of the company’s Futrograde show at New York Fashion Week. It sold NFTs (“digital collectibles”) that could be redeemed for physical sneakers.
The new Black Station 2 has “two distinct and explorable ‘worlds’”: “Unkai,” designed after the Japanese city Shibuya, and “Unter,” inspired by the club scene in Berlin. It also offers “phygital” (physical + digital) sneakers – a product that ties physical sneakers to a digital asset. [Readers may recall “phygitalization” from our stories on Vechain’s trophies and Decathlon’s phygital flagship in Dublin. Also, our sister publication Shoe Intelligence ran a story on phygital trade shows.]
Puma’s first phygital sneaker will be the Fast-RB, a running shoe with four Nitro pods and three Pwrplates.
Another novelty is credit-card payments. The original Black Station permitted payment by cryptocurrency. The company behind the technical aspects is MoonPay, whose HyperMint controls NFT smart contracts, NFT minting and NFT checkout for purchases in US dollars.
In between its metaverse changes, Puma has changed the name of the Nitro Collection to Puma Pass. Holders of Puma Pass NFTs gain access to such products as the Materializer NFT (“to-be-produced” physical) and the Digital Collectible NFT. Together these form a limited edition of 4,000 NFTs.
Black Station 2 is accessible at blackstation.puma.com. The Puma Pass is available for purchase on the secondary market at OpenSea.io.
