“Just Do It!” is one of the most recognizable slogans in the world, a slogan thought up by the genius athletic powerhouse, Nike. A company that sprung to life in the summer of 1964, when track and field coach, Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon believed he could come up with better athletic wear to train his athletes. And so he partnered up with the ambitious Phil Knight, a former student of his and they got to work.
Nearly five decades later, Nike is far from its roots in sports and athletic wear. Now, Nike is dipping its toes into the metaverse, exploring the next technology that will change how the modern world operates. Went as far as to purchase blockchain technology companies, all under the guise of exploring possibilities.
Is Nike just speculating and testing the field, or is Nike preparing for a secret takeover of the athletic metaverse?
This week, Nike under the guise of their newly owned NFT company, RTFKT (an abbreviation for “artifact”) purchased an Ethereum Name Service (ENS) for a secretive 19.72 Ether (ETH). The athletic juggernaut purchased something similar to a domain name for nearly $36,000. Typically this would mean nothing unless such a company was planning for something bigger with this purchase and the purchase of another ENS.
Understanding The Basics of Nameservers
During the dawn of the internet in the mid-1990s, computer scientists struggled with a system that would make the internet user-friendly. They had a problem matching IP addresses with names that made sense to people—and so the DNS was born.
The DNS or Domain Name Server is a brilliant invention by computer scientist Paul Mockapetris. He built on the earlier work from Elizebth Feinler, who first identified the complexity of having to type in entire IP addresses. The work that Feinler conducted during the 70s gave way to the first official registered website with the DNS in the 80s.
Today, you no longer need to even know the IP address of a website, let alone have to type out a string of numbers. All thanks to the brilliant work done by a pair of computer scientists who sought to make computers more accessible to the general population.
Nike and The New Crypto DNS
Following the gold rush to buy up as many website domains when the DNS first premiered, companies are getting in line for the next big crypto gold rush. As we can see, Nike is choosing their projects carefully and building up its metaverse cache in the secret. And with good reason, if more people know about the clandestine purchases of the new Ethereum Name Service—they will soon be gone.
Similar to how purchasing your name with a .com is no longer a straight shot, now we have to be creative and mix our name around a bit to get the domain that we want. Because in a very obvious manner, there are simply fewer and fewer available domains.
Just like the gold rush that is coming to the crypto naming services, the same happened when the internet first premiered so many decades ago.
The Future of Nike Metaverse
Nike’s future in the metaverse seems more robust than ever, with the help of their RTFKT crypto company and the litany of metaverse projects they are currently investing in—we can expect a more profound metaverse package from Nike in the coming months. Slowly but surely, their purchases will make light and they will begin to serve the customer. Because if there is something Nike loves, it is the customer.
Be on the lookout for, artifacts.eth. spacedrip.eth. and dreamos.eth — all Ethereum based domain servers purchased by Nike this past January and surely the contributors to the coming Nike Metaverse.
