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Nike, Adidas, Puma Race for Web3 Communities to Future-Proof Cultural Relevance

Plus: NFT Marketplace Volumes Drop Low, NFT Insider-Trading Case in Court

Happy Friday! Welcome to The Web3 Marketer, where I help brands and marketers stay ahead of the web3 curve. Every week, I bring you top stories on web3 & digital collectibles across consumer & loyalty.

Today's write-up is 989 words, a 4-minute read.

This week’s TL;DR:

  1. Nike, Adidas, and Puma future-proof cultural relevance

  2. NFT marketplace volumes, users drop to 2021 lows

  3. Trading NFTs on insider info gets you in jail

PLUS: Apple, Visa, Starbucks, L’Oréal, LVMH, WMG, NFL, and more!

📅 Upcoming events: NFT Talin (May 8-10), AdAge Web3 Marketing Summit, virtual (May 9-10), Shoptalk Europe, Barcelona (May 9-11), Vogue Business Technology Forum, virtual (May 11)

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The Big One

Sneaker Giants Are Racing for Web3 Communities to Future-Proof Cultural Relevance

Nike, Adidas, and Puma are doubling down on their web3 efforts by fostering native communities through the use of digital collectibles, exclusive virtual and physical merch drops, and IRL events. Read more 

The Takeaway: To stay relevant to increasingly digitalized young audiences, the three sneaker giants are testing contrasting approaches: build (ALTS by Adidas), buy (Nike & RTFKT), and partner (Puma & 10KTF).

By the Numbers

NFT Marketplace Volumes and Users Drop to 2021 Lows

On-chain NFT data suggests top marketplaces are experiences significant losses in transaction volumes and daily users, reaching low levels last seen in 2021. Possible drivers include “tax season liquidity issues”, meme coin trading frenzy, and costly network congestion. Read more

The Takeaway: P2P trading data does not reflect the full health of the NFT ecosystem as it does not capture primary sales from creators and free minting from brands. NFTs are not dead, they’re just losing speculative appeal.

Crypto Twitter Explained

First-Ever NFT Insider-Trading Case Heads to Trial

Now-former OpenSea employee, first flagged by a Twitter user, is being prosecuted by Justice Department for using confidential information to buy NFTs and later sell them at a profit, knowing that their prices would increase after being featured on the homepage. Read more 

The Takeaway: While NFTs may be new (and legally ambiguous), market manipulation schemes involving them will likely be prosecuted. Hence, when issuing or distributing NFTs, platforms and builders should remain prudent and “check with legal”.

Food for Thought

Speculative NFT Szn Is Ded

The Takeaway: In the long run, NFT is a technology (not a jpeg), and it will disappear in the background — just like the coding language of your bank’s mobile app, which you’d never care about (it just gets the job done).

Top Headlines

🛍 Consumer & Mainstream

🤖 Metaverse

💍 Fashion & Luxury Goods

🎬️ Entertainment & Media

🏈 Sports

🛠️ MarTech & CreatorTech

💰️ Deals

  • Karate Combat raised $18M to launch an app and token for its full-contact karate mixed with extended reality (XR).

  • TinyTap raised $8.5M at $100M valuation to “disrupt education with web3”.

  • Flow raised $3M in seed funding to build AI-centric NFT aggregator.

  • Tribe3 raised $2.1M to scale its social and gamified NFT futures exchange.

  • Crypto bumped to the back seat as AI investments accelerate.

🤓 Guides and Tutorials

🗃 Additions to the Web3 Tools database (294 total)

  • Playground: helps people discover community and creators monetize their audience

  • Moonsight: insights and analytics from blockchain data

  • Reserv: ticketing ecosystem for creators, venues, and artists

  • Raleon: growth and retention platform

  • Wombi: attribution and measurement platform

  • Safary: channel ROI, users and customer segments

📚️ For the Weekend

  • A Technologist’s Approach to Explaining What Crypto Fixes (Coindesk)

  • AI's Interface Revolution: How You Interact With Every Product and Service Is About to Change (Substack)

  • AI Artist Generated $3M in Less Than Two Years Selling Artwork on the Blockchain (Fortune)

  • Innovating a 114-Year-Old Brand with Condé Nast (🎙️Apple; 44 min)

  • Adidas Team Talks ALTS by Adidas NFT initiative (🎙️Apple; from 32 min)

Meme of the Week

That’s all. See you next week!

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Author Bio

Kuba Szewczyk is an NFT Product Strategy Lead at ConsenSys, helping build NFT tools for brands and creators. He previously worked at Bain & Co. Digital Assets and earned Harvard MBA.

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