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Adidas kicked off its move into the cryptocurrency world by revealing Adidas real estate in The Sandbox, quickly followed up by a Tweet announcing a partnership with Coinbase. The German fashion brand then decided to team up with a swathe of NFT OGs to launch its very own NFT collection.
Rather than leaping onto the scene with fanfare, fireworks, and a huge party, the “Into the Metaverse” collection merely stumbled into existence, plagued with issues and complaints. Minting issues, bots and spiraling gas fees turned what should have been an emphatic and groundbreaking day into one that Adidas are likely hoping to forget.
“Into the Metaverse” Launched with a Bang
Adidas Originals launched its “Into the Metaverse” collection on December 17, 2021. In order to pull this off and generate as much hype as possible, Adidas teamed up with Bored Ape Yacht Club, PUNKS Comic, and Gmoney. However, all of that mind power, creativity and experience could only yield a single animated digital artwork with 30,000 copies. For such big names in the NFT space, you’d expect an NFT collection worthy of the gods. Instead, punters were left with a rather mundane and boring spinning piece of digital art – if they could make it through the minting process.
The sale netted 6,000 ETH for Adidas NFT, which was worth a smidge more than $23 million at the time. Out of the $23 million, Adidas has said that $15.5 million came from the Early Access minting session. This exclusive early access minting session was plagued with technical issues that caused it to pause and then restart later on. The repercussions of this pause were felt by thousands of prospective investors as their transactions were lost, yet they still lost their gas fees. Adidas have promised to refund these lost fees, but whether they’ll stay true to this promise has yet to be seen. Let’s hope same doesn’t happen to UNICEF.
Script Kids Stealing All the Fun
For hardcore NFT collectors, and speculators hoping to turn a quick profit, the public sale was equally frustrating. Controls were meant to be in place to prevent a single wallet from minting more than 2 NFTs from the “Into the Metaverse” collection, but script kids managed to bypass this. There were dozens of bots minting piles of NFTs, sending them all to the same wallet. This left genuine punters stuck out in the cold and the increased demand for Ethereum transactions forced gas fees to climb higher. This in turn hurt not only other prospective “Into the Metaverse” buyers, but everyone else trying to use the Ethereum blockchain.
NFT Flippers Left Disappointed
As is the case with most NFT collections these days, a large number of people bought the “Into the Metaverse” collection to simply make a quick profit. When a major brand like Adidas dives into the NFT world and teams up with NFT OGs, you’d expect far more price action than we saw. Initial minting cost .2ETH, and at the time of writing, “Into the Metaverse” NFTs are selling for around .7ETH on OpenSea. This is considerably lower than most NFT flippers were expecting, and it begins to raise questions as to what value the “Into the Metaverse” genuinely has.
With 30,000 carbon copies of the same piece of digital art, there are a lot of reasons as to why it stands to reason that .7ETH is probably way too much money for one of these NFTs. Given the media hype and attention, the price performance is indicative of a poor and boring NFT collection.
Mistakes Were Made
When you consider that Adidas, a company with a nearly infinite budget for marketing stunts such as this, teamed up with NFT OGs that have created, marketed, and launched dozens of successful NFT collections, too many mistakes were made. Technical errors that caused minting to pause should not have appeared. More time and effort should have gone into the digital artwork.
NFT collectors and enthusiasts are feeling short changed and abused by Adidas NFT, Bored Ape Yacht Club, PUNKS Comic, and Gmoney. It’s stunts like this that give genuine NFT artists a bad reputation. It’s evident that the “Into the Metaverse” collection was a simple marketing stunt designed to curry favor for Adidas with crypto enthusiasts.
Adidas has acknowledged that mistakes were made during the process, but it’s far too late. More time, care and effort should have been put in during the development stage to ensure that the first endeavor of a major company into the NFT world was unforgettable for all the right reasons. Adidas might have a first mover advantage, but this is definitely a collection that it’ll want to forget as soon as possible.
Will Others Follow Suit?
It stands to reason that other major brands will dive into the NFT scene, and hopefully they will learn from the mistakes Adidas made. There is so much room for creativity to be poured in when it comes to NFTs, and one can only hope that the brands that pick up the mantle will use NFTs to their full potential, rather than as a quick cash grab. The real question is whether Bored Ape Yacht Club, PUNKS Comic, and Gmoney have sullied their reputation or not with this poor show…