We are deep in the digital world, the token world. Companies and organizations around the planet are constantly looking at ways to “tokenize” assets and goods, and the blockchain provides a fantastic platform to achieve that particular goal.
Nike, one of the planet’s market leaders in sports footwear, reportedly patented shoes that are tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain as an NFT, or non-fungible token. The information was provided by a known crypto news site this week.
The date of the patent is December 10, 2019. It talks about a digital asset for shoes and several avenues to take advantage of it. One of the ways outlined in the document is as an Ethereum ERC721 or ERC1155 token to authenticate a physical shoe and perform transactions with it.
An ID Code
There will be an owner identification code that, after a person acquires a specific shoe, will be linked with the item’s 10-digit identification code. The token will become unlocked after the purchase has been completed.
The goal is to achieve more transparency and ensure the authenticity of items. The patent describes the system’s intentions:
“Prospective and current owners […] may buy and sell digital assets through one or more blockchain ledgers operating on the decentralized computing system. […] By way of example, and not limitation, a user may buy a new pair of highly sought after sneakers from a verified vendor who may provide authenticated provenance records for the sneakers. […] After receiving the shoe box containing the purchased sneakers, the user scans the box UPC with a barcode scan feature in a sneakers app operating on the user’s smartphone.”
The giant footwear company also seems to indicate that the development of the token is related to shoe sales: the system will let customers verify and check the scarcity of some of the circulating items.
“When a consumer buys a genuine pair of shoes a digital representation of a show may be generated, linked with the consumer, and assigned a cryptographic token, where the digital shoe and cryptographic token collectively represent a ‘CryptoKick.'”
Transferring Ownership
After the pair of shoes has been sold, the ownership of the item in question is transferred with the physical asset. To manage the property of the tokens, there will be a dedicated app, which will also promote brand management.
Borrowing some concepts of CryptoKitties, a game of collectible cats, Nike suggests, according to the patent document that the commercialized items, in this case, the shoes, can be bred.
“Using the digital asset, the buyer is enabled to securely trade or sell the tangible pair of shoes, trade or sell the digital shoe, store the digital shoe in a cryptocurrency wallet or other digital blockchain locker, intermingle or “breed” the digital shoe with another digital shoe to create “shoe offspring,” and, based on rules of acceptable shoe manufacturability, have the newly bred shoe offspring custom made as a new, tangible pair of shoes.”
By Andres Chavez
