Europe's Largest Sportswear Manufacturer Adidas Credits Tesla For Its Web3 Incursion

When American electric vehicle maker Tesla announced in 2021 that it would accept Bitcoin as a form of payment for its vehicles, it was unaware that its move would inspire Europe's largest sportswear manufacturer Adidas to embrace the emerging technology, Web3.

With the explosive surge in popularity of the digital asset called cryptocurrency, web3 - the concept for the new iteration of the World Wide Web, which features ideas like token-based economics, decentralization and blockchain technologies - has become mainstream.

The sportswear maker has been planning its Web3 strategy for several months and as a product of this months-long building, the brand recently launched its Non-Fungible Token (NFT) collection with future Web3 projects which include token-gated sneaker drops and accepting Apecoin - the fungible ERC-20 token - inspired by the popular NFT collection Bored Ape yacht Club (BAYC).

However, Adidas may have failed to dip its toes into Web3 and come up with these strategies as well as projects had it not been for Tesla's move to embrace Bitcoin as a form of payment for its vehicles.

"Elon Musk helped to open that door for us, just a little bit, so we could capture people's imaginations internally," Adidas Web3 lead Erika Wykes-Sneyd said in an interview during the NFT Paris conference in February.

"We did use it as a slipstream," the executive noted, explaining that Tesla's move allowed them, particularly Web3 advocates within Adidas, to "start the conversation" on what the sportswear manufacturer could do with blockchain technology.

Wyks-Sneyd shared that from the beginning, the company simply wanted to "make sure we're supercharging and using Web3 to fast track what Adidas is saying its corporate goals are."

Wyks-Sneyd's team spent nine long months "laying down the strategy, building the foundations, a lot of relationship building" before implementing its Web3 plans.

"By the time we went to market, everybody, for the most part, thought, 'Wow, Adidas is early,'" the executive said, but noted, "we were, but we were actually thinking about this and planning it for 10 months prior."

And, while Tesla was one of the first few companies to embrace Bitcoin as a form of payment, the initiative was short-lived and was put on pause in May 2021 due to long-brewing environmental concerns. Adidas, on the other hand, is more committed to crypto and Web3.

"We've fully indoctrinated everybody at this point," Wykes-Sneyd said, noting, "that's been part of the journey for the last year and a half, is getting people across a huge global organization to be drinking the Kool-Aid."

Instead of just simply accepting crypto assets as a form of payment for its products, Adidas has unveiled an ambitious Web3 program, which includes purchasing its own BAYC MFT, collaborating with gmoney, an NFT collector for its multi-dollar platform drop, and working with one of the world's largest crypto exchange platforms Coinbase and metaverse platform Sandbox.