Adidas has teamed up with non-fungible token specialist Bored Ape Yacht Club, cryptocurrency investor Gmoney, and Punks Comic to release its own set of NFTs as the sportswear brand pushes further into the metaverse.
The Adidas Originals NFT collection, which went on sale Friday, provides access to virtual wearables for blockchain-based gaming metaverse The Sandbox. It will also produce physical products, including a hoodie, a tracksuit and a beanie.
“As part of our ambition to celebrate ideas that are defining a new age of originality, we’ve landed at the forefront of creativity, which is the open metaverse,” Adidas Originals Marketing and Communications Vice President Erika Wykes-Sneyd said in a statement sent to Bitcoin.com News. “It’s a natural place for Adidas Originals to enter: a wild world where possibilities are truly limitless and where anyone can express and be rewarded for their most original ideas.”
The Adidas NFTs will be available at adidas.com/metaverse at 0.2 ETH ($766) per unit. The virtual and physical wearables will be made available in 2022.
Targeting a very different audience, former US first lady Melania Trump has launched her own NFT platform, from which a proportion of the proceeds will go to helping children in foster care.
The first NFT, a watercolor by the French artist Marc-Antoine Coulon titled “Melania’s Vision,” will be available for purchase through the end of the year for the price of 1 SOL ($150), the cryptocurrency of the Solana blockchain protocol.
Elsewhere, Russia’s central bank stepped up its campaign against private cryptocurrencies on Friday.
Valeriy Lyakh, head of its department for countering market misconduct, said in a video that investment in cryptocurrencies was an “out-and-out swindle” and a “financial pyramid.”
The market was volatile and had no regulation, Lyakh said, adding that nobody investigated manipulation in it.
Russia opposed private cryptocurrencies for years, saying they could be used in money laundering or to finance terrorism.
Although it gave them legal status in 2020, it banned their use as a means of payment.
“We have a negative attitude toward crypto currencies. We definitely do not support any circulation of it in our country,” Lyakh said in the video.
Sources told Reuters on Thursday that Russia’s central bank sees risks to financial stability in the rising number of crypto transactions and advocates a “complete rejection” of them, sending bitcoin falling.
In a reply to Reuters’ request for comment, the central bank said it was preparing an advisory report to set out its stance on the issue. It did not comment on specifics.
On the markets, bitcoin fell 3.8 percent to $47,238 as of 12:30 p.m. in London, while Ethereum was down 5.6 percent to $3,841.
