Nike acquires RTFKT! Collaboration with Takashi Murakami CLONE X rushed to the top of OpenSea sales

Nike, a major American sports goods manufacturer, officially announced today (14) the acquisition of RTFKT Studios. According to the official press release, the transaction terms of the acquisition will not be disclosed. Nike President and CEO John Donahoe (John Donahoe) said: This acquisition is another step in accelerating Nike’s digital transformation, allowing us to provide athletes and creators at the intersection of sports, creativity, games, and culture. Serve. We are acquiring a very talented creative team who have authentic and connected brands. Our plan is to invest in the RTFKT brand to provide services and growth for their innovative and creative community, while expanding Nike's digital footprint and capabilities.

RTFKT

After Nike's official announcement, RTFKT Studios also confirmed the news on the official Twitter. RTFKT was co-founded by Benoit Pagotto, ChrisLe and Steven Vasilev in 2020. This team uses the latest game engine, NFT, blockchain authentication and augmented reality (AR) technologies to create innovative virtual products and experiences.

The origin that allowed this company to gain popularity is a pair of virtual sneakers CyberSneaker designed by RTFKT inspired by Tesla’s electric truck Cybertruck. They edited these sneakers on a photo of Musk attending the MetGala charity dinner in 2018, and Putting it on the official Instagram quickly attracted fans' attention and inquiries. At that time, the virtual sneakers were sold for about $15,000.

The OpenSea page of RTFKT shows that RTFKT has 561 NFTs in its collection and has created at least 1,000 NFTs. "CryptoBriefing" reported that one of RTFKT's flagship products is a virtual sneaker project inspired by CryptoPunks, one of which was sold for 3.2ETH (over 12,000 US dollars) today.

In March of this year, it also released the metaversekicks series in collaboration with NFT artist Fewocious, and quickly sold more than 600 pairs of virtual sneakers for more than $3 million in 7 minutes.

Collaborate with Murakami Takashi, a popular project CLONEX

RTFKT's most recent project is CLONEX, a large-scale project launched in collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

CLONEX is an Avatar project of 20,000 3D characters, which means that the owner can use them in AR filters, virtual online meetings, games, etc., as an image to enter the meta-universe. Each character has a randomly assigned appearance. Takashi Murakami designs the character's eyes, mouth, helmet and characteristics, and injects its representative cartoon aesthetic elements.

The background of CloneX’s story is that after a group of aliens came to the earth, they extracted people’s consciousness from the original body, and then put the extracted consciousness into individual digital Clone X avatars (digital Clone Xavatars), allowing humans to evolve to the next Phase, so that people have more time and energy to explore farther planets or galaxies without worrying about birth, old age, sickness and death.

According to OpenSea market data, CLONEX and RTFKT won the platform's seven-day trading volume champion and runner-up: CLONEX trading volume reached 22,054 ETH, while RTFKT reached 10,567 ETH, surpassing recent popular projects CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Nike applied for a virtual product patent last month

According to previous reports from Bihuan, Nike filed a number of virtual product trademark applications with the Patent and Trademark Office in October this year. In addition, the company recently announced vacancies for shoe virtual material designers and other virtual design positions. And as early as January 2019, an NFT project called "CryptoKicks" was created.

In recent months, Nike and its competitor adidas have been paying attention to the meta-universe theme one after another. In September, Nike created Nikeland, the first customized brand space for virtual experience in Roblox's immersive 3D platform.

In November, adidas confirmed the establishment of a new partnership with Coinbase and The Sandbox. Earlier this month, adidas also announced the establishment of new partnerships with Bored Ape Yacht Club, Punks Comic, and Gmoney to expand NFT’s cooperation business, and released a 3D avatar wearing adidas classic costumes. A series of interesting attempts.