Nike wants to issue subdomains on Ethereum?

RTFKT, Nike’s Web3 company, owns ten Ethereum Name Services (ENS). 

Nike’s purchase strategy: accumulate Ethereum Name Services 

The most recent purchase is dotswoosh.eth, paid 19.72 ETH, or about $37,000. 

dotswoosh.eth bought for 19.72 ETH on OpenSea ? #domains $ENS https://t.co/Ec0Iet0l8P

— ENS Sales Bot (@EnsSales) May 27, 2022

The purchase took place on Friday 27 May on the famous OpenSea platform after the ENS had been deposited there some ten days ago. 

Dotswoosh.eth was originally created by anonymous user 4FE4E6 who has created as many as 1.2 million items on OpenSea. 

It is not yet clear why Nike purchased dotswoosh.eth via RTFKT, but there is some speculation that the company intends to use it in the future to issue subdomains, such as subdomain.dotswoosh.eth. 

The logo of this ENS, in fact, shows a dot followed by the Nike logo, which suggests that the purpose might be precisely to issue subdomains. Of the ten ENSs owned by RTFKT, this is the only one with a distinct logo that can be directly traced back to Nike.

It is worth noting that Nike’s iconic logo is called a swoosh, so dotswoosh seems to indicate a dot-swoosh sub-domain. 

The other ENSs owned by Nike via RTFKT seem to indicate a real corporate strategy in this regard. Apart from artifacts.eth, rtfkt.eth, which refer to the company name, for instance mintvial.eth seems to be a clear reference to the NFT CloneX Mint Vial Ethereum that can be used to create CloneX avatars. 

Spacedrip.eth, on the other hand, refers to Nike’s NFT Space Drip digital shoes, while skinvial.eth refers to NFT Skin Vials that can be used to change the appearance of Nike’s CryptoKicks. 

Nike’s entry into the blockchain world

The company began to be active on the Ethereum blockchain back in December 2019, when it patented a system to tokenize shoes. Whereas in April 2022, it landed in the Metaverse with Nike Cryptokicks, thanks to RTFKT and Skin Vial. 

RTFKT, together with Nike CryptoKicks, introduce the future of Sneakers, powered by Skin Vial tech

Welcome to 2052 : ??? pic.twitter.com/7449L79Bf4

— RTFKT (@RTFKT) April 22, 2022

It is still too early to know where they want to go with this, also because this initiative has only been around for a very short time. 

However, it is worth mentioning that NFTs are perfect for use as digital certificates of ownership of collectibles, and some Nike shoes are also very popular in this respect. 

We will also have to see what the relationship will be between Nike’s digital objects, which are more easily represented with NFTs, and the physical ones, since the latter are for obvious reasons more difficult to exchange online. 

What seems quite clear is that this could be only the beginning of a long presence of Nike within Web3, so much so that we can imagine that there could be many more innovations in this sense in the near future.