What you need to know about Nike’s new web3 platform .Swoosh

Yesterday the athletic gear giant announced .Swoosh, described in a blog post on Nike’s website as “a web3-enabled platform that champions athletes and serves the future of sport by creating a new, inclusive digital community and experience and a home for Nike virtual creations.”

Here’s what you need to know about Nike’s new platform:

• .Swoosh, a blockchain-based platform, is being positioned by Nike as a virtual space where everyone who’s currently – or interested in becoming – engaged with the brand (including athletes, digital creators and collectors) can congregate “to design and own the future of sport,” per the brand.

• .Swoosh can be accessed at welcome.swoosh.nike. Inside the virtual space, community members will have the opportunity to peruse and purchase virtual collectibles, including shoes and jerseys, which – according to Nike – “members will soon be able to wear in digital games and immersive experiences.”

• Nike’s new web3 platform is currently in beta. The brand says that registration to join will begin later this month.

• “For the rest of this year, Nike will grow the platform by inviting in a community that is as diverse and equitable as possible,” the brand wrote in yesterday’s blog post. “That means prioritizing local communities that Nike supports across its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, starting with the United States and select countries in Europe, and skill-building with them so that they’re ready to participate.”

• Nike says that it will release its first-ever collection of digital wearables – which will be “shaped by the [.Swoosh] platform’s community” – in 2023. Shortly thereafter, .Swoosh community members will be able “to enter a community challenge to win the opportunity to co-create virtual product with Nike.” The brand is offering royalties to the winners who help to co-create virtual products.

• The driving motivation behind the launch of .Swoosh, Nike writes, is “to expand the definition of sport – and serve its future – by democratizing the web3 experience so that everyone can collect, create and own a piece of this new digital world.”

• Nike has already made a name for itself in the web3 community. Around this time last year, the brand launched a branded virtual experience called Nikeverse in Roblox; though Roblox isn’t blockchain-based, it has evolved to become one of the most popular gateways into the metaverse, a nascent but rapidly emerging virtual world that many in the web3 community would argue is part and parcel of the web3 movement. Nike also launched CryptoKicks, its debut NFT campaign, in late 2021.

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