“The thing that gets me most excited is going through this renaissance,” said Chui, who has two pairs of Cryptokicks. For him, the Cryptokicks are much more than a virtual sneaker. So with that in mind, is a shoe that is basically only displayed even really a shoe anymore?”Ĭhui feels the same way. “In the four years that I owned them, I wore them a whopping two times. “The most expensive physical sneaker I ever owned was a pair of Nike Air Yeezy 2 Red Octobers, which I sold for $9,000,” Honjo said. But a physical version is almost beside the point for Honjo. Others are hoping to be able to redeem their NFTs for a physical version. “Then you can flex your sneakers in games, and not only on the street.” “It will be huge if Nike can get their NFT sneakers into games like Fortnite or GTA6,” Alker of Highsnobiety said, referring to Grand Theft Auto VI. But owners are hoping they eventually will be able to modify them as new skins are released, and also wear them in online games and in the metaverse. There are only 18 Alien vials on the market, with a floor price of 90 Ether (about $176,000).įor now, the Cryptokicks only exist in digital form, viewable on OpenSea or the RTFKT site. As of this writing, there are 5,661 Human vials available on OpenSea, with a floor price of 0.59 Ether (about $1,154, although crypto prices have been fluctuating wildly). Their value on the secondary market varies widely, according to scarcity. ? Limited Time Offer | Express Premium with ad-lite for just Rs 2/ day ?? Click here to subscribe ? Owners were randomly assigned one of eight skins, ranging from the most common, “Human,” with its fuchsia and black colorway, to the rarest, “Alien,” in purple and green. The skins also determine the sneaker’s worth. Inside, owners found a digital image of a generic basketball shoe called a Nike Dunk Genesis Cryptokick, along with a virtual “skin vial”- a glowing canister that, once inserted into a port on the virtual sneaker’s tongue, gives the sneaker its final look. On April 22, after months of speculation, Nike announced on Twitter, Discord and other social media platforms that owners could connect their crypto wallets, where they stored the NFTs, to the RTFKT site to “open” their boxes, Chui said. “You have to believe that this is going to be another revolutionary sneaker, akin to the 1985 Air Jordan 1,” Honjo said.
That didn’t stop Bryson Honjo, 31, who lives in Honolulu and runs UntiedHawaii, a YouTube sneaker channel, from paying 5 Ether apiece for two MNLTH boxes. (Nike did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) Everyone else could buy one on OpenSea, starting around 5 Ether (about $15,000 at the time), although no one knew what was inside. Some 8,100 people who owned an NFT from one of RTFKT’s earlier collections received a MNLTH for no additional cost, said Joe Chui, 39, an NFT analyst in San Francisco who runs the YouTube channel RealTalkFIRE, and who received two. The only clue about what was inside was the Nike Swoosh and RTFKT’s lightning bolt logo. In February, RTFKT released 20,000 NFTs of a mysterious box called MNLTH, pronounced “monolith” (vowels, apparently, are for noobs in the NFT world).
So what do the buyers of the Nike Cryptokicks actually own? It’s not entirely clear. Collectors can show them off on social media or in NFT exchanges like OpenSea. In one sense, virtual sneakers offer the same bragging rights as the real thing. The virtual sneaker can be worn in the app, and features “gamification” features including sneaker leveling, shoe-minting and NFT customization, said Yawn Rong, one of the founders of STEPN. Asics, the Japanese athletic brand, recently created 1,000 NFT sneakers in collaboration with STEPN, a fitness app that rewards runners with cryptocurrency for each step they take (think of it as a combination of Pokemon GO and Strava).