Web3 Expansion of Adidas That Inspires Many from its Move

• Web3 technology has attracted Adidas which is ready to explore the web3 world.
• However, Elon Musk’s Tesla may have worked as an inspiration for Adidas’s web3 expansion.

Tesla owner Elon Musk and his company have inspired the sportswear company— Adidas for its web3 plans. The web3 lead at Adidas Erika Wykes-Sneyd said that the short-lived experiment of Tesla with Bitcoin helped crypto advocates at Adidas “start the conversation” around blockchain.

In March 2021 when Musk announced that his company would accept Bitcoin for its cars, it proved to be a short-lived initiative. Then the next move by Tesla opened a door for Adidas’ plan to use blockchain technology, as said by Wykes-Sneyd.

At the NFT Paris conference, the web3 lead said that “Elon Musk helped to open that door for us, just a little bit, so we could capture people’s imaginations internally. We did use it as a slipstream.” This enabled Web3 advocates at the company to “start the conversation” around what Adidas could do with blockchain technology.

Notably, Adidas was keen to avoid one thing that was offering crypto payment options for its products. Wykes-Sneyd said “I think those of us that knew were like, Well, I don’t think just accepting crypto is what it means to get in this space.”

Web3 strategy that Adidas follows

Despite the focus over cryptocurrencies, Adidas embarked on an ambitious program of Web3 initiatives. The initiative includes buying its own Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT, teaming up with NFT collector gmoney on a multimillion-dollar NFT drop and partnering with crypto exchange Coinbase and metaverse platform The Sandbox. Moreover, Adidas has showcased its Bored Ape avatar, Indigo Herz, in its World Cup trailer.

Wykes-Sneyd said that from day one the target was to “make sure we’re supercharging and using Web3 to fast track what Adidas is saying its corporate goals are.” She added this added a lot of hard-work and planning and along her team they spent nine months engaging in “laying down the strategy, building the foundations, a lot of relationship building” before putting its Web3 plans into action.

The web3 lead at Adidas further said “by the time we went to market, everybody for the most part thought, ‘Wow, Adidas is early.’ And we were, but we were actually thinking about this and planning it for 10 months prior.”

In addition, the future plans of Adidas include token-gated sneaker drops and—potentially—payments in Apecoin, the Bored Ape Yacht Club-themed token.

On the other hand, for Tesla it abandoned its plans to use Bitcoin as a payment method mere months after Elon Musk’s much-trumpeted announcement, citing the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies.

And for its part, Adidas is more committed to cryptocurrency and Web3. Wykes-Sneyd said “We’ve fully indoctrinated everybody at this point. That’s been part of the journey for the last year and a half, is getting people across a huge global organization to be drinking the Kool-Aid.”

Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast and believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks and step aside from traditional monetary exchange systems. She is also intrigued by blockchain technology and its functioning.

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