Coca Cola, Nike, McDonald’s and other brands that hopped on the NFT bandwagon this year

Footwear brand Nike acquired a brand called RTFKT earlier this month. RTFKT – pronounced ‘artifact’ – is known for making custom sneakers that are meant for gaming enthusiasts.

And now, Nike wants to launch a digital collection of sneakers. It’s already filed trademark applications for ‘Nike’, ‘Just Do It’, ‘Jordan’, and its other properties to prevent knockoffs of its products from entering the digital world.

“This acquisition is another step that accelerates Nike’s digital transformation and allows us to serve athletes and creators at the intersection of sport, creativity, gaming and culture,” said John Donahoe, President and chief executive officer of Nike in a statement.

These digital sneakers are likely to launch within ‘Nikeland’ – a free, 3-D space that the company has created within the Roblox gaming platform.

One of Nike’s chief competitors, German sportswear maker Adidas, has taken interest in the NFT market as well. It launched a collection of 30,000 NFTs, called Into the Metaverse, on December 16. Adidas and its partners held on to about 380 of these NFTs, which will be used for “future events”. At 0.2 ETH, this means that Adidas earned over $20 million for the sale of these NFTs.

The company partnered with some of the most popular names in NFTs out there for the sale, including Bored Ape Yacht Club, Punks Comics and GMoney. At the moment, buying these NFTs doesn’t give people access to physical merchandise in 2022, but Adidas plans to have special physical merchandise — like hoodies and tracksuits — in 2022 as well.

Earlier this month, gaming giant Ubisoft announced an NFT platform called Quartz to sell in-game items from popular title Ghost Recon as NFTs. The platform has received a lot of blowback, but the company isn’t giving up on it just yet. In fact, companies like Ubisoft, EA and more see value in the use of NFTs in future.

The company hasn’t sold a lot of its NFTs yet, but Ubisoft is behind some of the most popular gaming titles in the world, including Assassin’s Creed, meaning the company may have many more NFTs in its arsenal.

For some NFTs are a means of ownership, for others it’s a means to advertise and market themselves. And to that end, Pepsi has decided to mark the year of its birth - 1893 - by selling 1893 NFTs to the world, called the Pepsi Mic Drop collection.

The NFTs are inspired by some of the company’s best known colas — Classic Blue Pepsi, Red Pepsi Wild Cherry, Silver Diet Pepsi and many more. The NFTs will live on the Ethereum platform and will be generated randomly by an algorithm..

If Pepsi did it then how can Coca Cola be far away, right?

The company made over $575,000 by foraying into the metaverse back in May. Auctioned over a 72 hour period, the NFts were all sold as a single “loot box” through the OpenSea platform. It included four friendship inspired NFTs that were built around Coca Cola’s merchandise. The collectibles had things like vintage Coca Cola coolers, a custom designed Coca Cola bubble jacket and more.

French luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton didn’t just launch an NFT collection of its own, it launched a new mobile game that would allow players to collect 30 free NFTs. The company partnered with the digital artist Beeple, who sold an NFT for over $69 million at an auction in March this year.

Technically, McDonald’s entered the NFT space in 2020, long before most other brands. However, in October the company decided to celebrate the 40th anniversary of its McRib sandwich by coming back to this technology.

“Our McRib NFTs are digital versions of the fan favourite sandwich – almost as saucy as the McRib itself– and we're giving them away to a few lucky fans on Twitter beginning Nov. 1,” the company said in a press release.

To be clear, the company didn’t actually sell its NFTs to raise money. Instead, McDonald’s chose a few “lucky fans” who had Twitter accounts and internet access and handed the NFTs over to them. Whether that means that these NFTs will be even more valuable in future is a question that only time can answer.

If there’s one brand that can really take advantage of NFTs, it’s Warner Brothers. The comics, superhero movies and science fiction stuff that this conglomerate owns are literally full of collectibles, and you can rest assured that someone in the WB boardroom argued that selling them as NFTs will make “business sense”.

The company started this with the new Matrix movie, and all 100,000 of those NFTs have already been sold out. The project is designed after popular NFT projects like Bored Apes and Crypto punks, in the sense that WB is actually selling avatars designed after characters in the movie. They are minted using Palm, which uses environmentally sound means to mine cryptos.

Bacardi’s NFT collection was unveiled in October and it’s the first time that the company has forayed into this space. The alcohol company partnered with Grammy Award winning producer Bol-1da to debut the project, as part of a project to give representation to “underrepresented” voices in the industry. It picked artists like Bambii, Denise De’ion, PERFXN and more.

The NBA is one of the biggest names in sports to have taken to the crypto and NFT craze. Of course, football teams have followed, but the NBA’s crypto tokens and NFTs have already minted billions on the Internet.