The iconic brand has filed seven U.S. trademarks – including for its swoosh logo and “Just Do It” slogan – for a bunch of “downloadable virtual goods.”
These include sneakers as well as eyewear, sports equipment, bags, backpacks, and toys.
The company has also announced it’s hiring for metaverse jobs.
It recently posted openings for a “virtual material designer” of footwear in addition to other virtual design roles.
Our tech expert, Jeff Brown, first put the metaverse on his readers’ radars back in March.
And once again, he was early on a market-shaping megatrend.
At the end of last month, Facebook (FB) – the world’s largest social media company – announced that it wants to become a metaverse company. It’s even changing its name to Meta (MVRS).
That Nike – the world’s most valuable apparel brand – is also planning on doing business in the metaverse is another sign this idea is going mainstream.
So today, I’m continuing my campaign to get you to pay attention to what’s going on and position yourself to profit.
We’ll dig into Nike’s metaverse plans… and what they mean.
I’ll also pass along two simple ways to invest before the crowd jumps in.
Instead of looking at web pages or videos… you step inside 3D worlds as an “avatar,” or digital representation of yourself.
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Meeting participants’ avatars on Horizon Workrooms, a virtual meeting app from Facebook.
Source: Facebook
Here’s how Jeff describes it…
The metaverse is a bunch of shared virtual worlds you can enter and interact with others in. We’ll be able to go to these 3D digital worlds to work, play, and be entertained.
There will be many worlds we can enter, just as there are many social media platforms or e-commerce websites. You don’t need anything more than your regular browser and a broadband internet connection to enter the metaverse. But augmented reality – which mixes the real world and computer-generated graphics – and virtual reality will help bring the metaverse to life.
And that only scratches the surface of the coming changes…
As I’ve been showing you, many of the virtual worlds in the metaverse will be built on blockchains. They’re the decentralized networks behind bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies.
And their involvement is key…
Blockchains allow you to create not only scarce digital currencies… but also scarce digital goods. This allows crypto-based economies to flourish in the metaverse. Jeff again…
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will allow you to buy and sell digital goods – such as clothing for your avatar, items for gaming, collectibles, and more.
You’ll use cryptocurrencies to buy and sell these digital goods. You’ll also get paid in crypto for creating content and services within these worlds.
In March, I showed you how buyers had just forked out $3.1 million on 621 pairs of virtual sneakers.
And the folks at Nike must be looking on in envy at virtual sneaker company RTFKT (pronounced “artifact”).
RTFKT sells limited-edition NFTs representing sneakers your avatar can wear.
The company posted $4.5 million in sales for the January-to-March quarter. It auctions each pair of its NFT sneakers for $10,000 to $60,000.
And unlike Nike, RTFKT doesn’t have to deal with supply-chain disruptions between factories in China and Vietnam and markets in Europe and the U.S.
I couldn’t find exact figures. But you can bet the profit margins on a pair of digital sneakers are way higher than they are on physical sneakers.
“Chris, you’re off your rocker. Why would I want to own sneakers I can’t wear just to make my avatar look cool?”
The answer is you may not. But billions of other people will.
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the lockdowns that followed, led us all to spend more of our lives online.
We interact with work colleagues… friends… and family via Zoom (ZM). We even send our kids to Zoom schools.
And we spend much of the rest of the day online… either for work or to wind down after work.
In many ways, we’re becoming a digital species.
And just as we seek status in the physical world with the latest kicks from Nike… we’ll seek status in the virtual worlds we spend time in.
That’s why people are snapping up NFTs of pixelated JPEGs of characters for thousands of dollars.
One of these kinds of NFT characters is called a CryptoPunk.
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CryptoPunk 7610, which Visa (V) bought for $150,000 on August 18.
Source: Visa Inc.
Close to 19,000 CryptoPunks have sold so far… with a combined value of $1.6 billion. That comes out to an average price of about $84,000 per NFT.
Folks use their CryptoPunks as their Twitter (TWTR) profile pics to signal status online.
Having one means you’re part of a small group of early adopters of the NFT trend. They show others you’re not only cool, but also rich and smart.
This status-signaling function is so important, Twitter has said it’ll work on a way to verify CryptoPunk and other NFT profile pics are genuine.
Its trademark application mentioned “retail store services featuring virtual goods.”
Can you picture it?
One day, you leave a meeting in a virtual conference room… head over to one of Nike’s virtual stores… pick up a new pair of virtual sneakers… then wear them to a virtual concert with your friends – all inside the metaverse.
I know this sounds wild… And it may be hard to imagine.
But if someone had told you in 1993, when the first commercially available web browser came out, that you’d be shopping online… video-chatting with your friends, family, and colleagues using 5G… streaming TV shows and movies on something called a smartphone… and posting pictures of your life for all to see on something called social media… that would have sounded weird, too.
If you’re having trouble remembering, this is what the internet looked like at the time…
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How the internet looked on Mosaic, the first commercially available web browser, in 1993.
Source: Stanislas Wiart
That the metaverse concept sounds crazy just means we’re still super early in this trend.
Eventually, it’ll seem like our current version of the internet – just the way things are. By then, though, the opportunities to really move the needle on your wealth will have disappeared.
As I said, it’s still the earliest days of this megatrend.
But there’s already an exchange-traded fund (ETF) that aims to give you exposure to stocks in a range of companies involved in the metaverse.
It’s called the Roundhill Ball Metaverse ETF (META).
If you’re new to investing, an ETF is a fund containing a basket of stocks that trades on an exchange just as an individual stock does.
META invests on your behalf in chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA). That company makes the graphics processing units (GPUs) necessary to render 3D virtual worlds.
META also holds shares in Roblox (RBLX), the company behind one of the most popular game platforms/virtual worlds in the metaverse. And it owns shares in Facebook.
The other route to investing in the metaverse is buying bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH). They’re the two biggest and most popular crypto assets in the world today.
As I went into more detail here, they stand to benefit as blockchain-based metaverse worlds accelerate mainstream adoption of crypto.
Regards,
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Chris Lowe
November 10, 2021
Barcelona, Spain