Adidas has entered into a partnership with Stepn, a Solana-based move-to-earn application, to offer generative NFTs to users. As a product of this partnership, a new NFT collection featuring Adidas sneakers was launched on Wednesday. For Adidas, creating digital avatars of their popular sneakers as NFTs is a way of connecting with the newer and emerging generation of consumers.
Called the Stepn x Adidas Genesis Sneakers series, this NFT collection has been made available on Mooar — a marketplace associated with Stepn. The collection offers 1,000 NFTs inspired by the brand’s designs.
Commenting on the development, Stepn CEO Shiti Manghani said the brand wishes to promote the concept of ‘move-to-earn’ in both, physical and digital worlds. Sneaker-inspired NFTs from Adidas could bring brand loyalists to play ‘move-to-earn’ games, making their digital avatars also wear Adidas shoes. She also noted that customer rewards are now entering a new era.
“Physical and digital – or ‘phygital’ – partnership between the most widely used lifestyle app and a global brand like Adidas underscores how powerful it is when you can move-and-earn in both the virtual and real world simultaneously. It also indicates the direction lifestyle rewards are going towards,” Manghani said in a press statement.
The collection is dropping in a two-stage raffle on Mooar, starting Wednesday. In the first stage, 200 NFTs will be reserved for Stepn’s userbase of five million customers. They can try to bag an NFT by depositing 10,000 tokens of Stepn’s native token, GMT. Those who fail to grab one of these NFTs will get full refunds, according to the company.
Stepn is attempting to gain some awareness and engagement for its GMT tokens, thanks to the partnership. Presently, the GMT token is trading at $0.2312 (roughly Rs. 19.34) as per CoinMarketCap.
In the second stage, Mooar will open a public raffle sale for the other 790 NFT pieces. Winners will be announced every 24 hours between April 18 and April 21. Stepn could also use this as an opportunity to drive customers to Mooar for a week.
Adidas previously partnered with a Web3 artist known as ‘Fewocious’ to be part of its new sneaker collection last year. The shoes from this collection were tied to an NFT redemption pass each of which brought benefits for the holders.
The brand had also announced the launch of its ALTS Dynamic NFT collection in April 2023, as part of expanding its ‘Into The Metaverse’ initiative that it kickstarted in 2021.