Stephen Curry, a member of the National Basketball Association and a recent crypto convert, issued a set of 2,974 non-fungible tokens that include digital replicas of the shoes he did wear when he broke the 3-point scoring record earlier this month, allowing owners to display them in three different metaverses.
The NFT drop, which is already sold out, permits customers to wear the shoes on three Ethereum-based metaverse platforms: Eric Schiermeyer’s Gala Games, Animoca Brands’ The Sandbox, and Decentraland. As per the dedicated website created in partnership with Curry’s real-world shoe business, Under Armour Inc., the net earnings from the sale will be given to groups promoting access to sport.
This year, NFTs soared in popularity, fueled in part by celebrity endorsements and sky-high prices paid for the most in-demand instances, sparking a speculative frenzy. The virtual Genesis Curry Flows shoes are an early effort at one of NFTs’ promises: the ability to purchase a digital product once and utilize it across several games or virtual experiences. The loot box dynamic is one thing they’ve borrowed from the gaming world: there are five varieties of shoes, each with increasing scarcity, and each owner has no idea which one they’ll receive ahead of time.
The website directs visitors to the OpenSea secondary market, which has seen many NFT speculative fever. Fans of Curry and his almost 3,000 NBA 3-pointers may have to compete with those trading on the shoes’ scarcity, but despite the buzz around this emerging market, a recent Chainalysis analysis indicated that just a tiny number of insiders is enjoying the majority of the earnings on NFTs.
