Curry Brand Brings Limited Sneaker NFT to Metaverse

If you’ve been reading up on the hype behind NFTs recently and still don’t fully understand them… join the club. Non-fungible tokens, as most people understand them, are akin to digital collectibles: Like art that exists online. And much like art, ownership of the original (or in this case, the image that the NFT exists as) is a mark of status. Why do you own something rare as a collectible? Because it has value. That’s the idea behind NFTs, if you were to make it boiler-plate simple.

Some members of the Golden State Warriors, given their proximity to Silicon Valley, have been invested in stuff like NFTs and cryptocurrency for awhile now. Most notably, veteran wing Andre Iguodala is one of the newer investors on the scene. He even spent some of his guest feature on Draymond Green’s podcast, “The Draymond Green Show”, earlier this month talking about NFTs and the investing space surrounding them.

The latest Warrior to get involved with the hype is none other than Stephen Curry, who released an NFT this week in celebration of his new three-point record. His brand, the Curry Brand, also released a collectible into Facebook’s new “Metaverse”: A rare, collectible shoe with a limited number available for users in the Metaverse to get.

These shoes are something Under Armor decided to release in an online environment as opposed to, you know, the real world. There isn’t really much of an explanation for it unless you boil it down to three things. It’s possibly a partnership with “Meta” (formerly Facebook), it could be a true belief that the Metaverse is the direction the world is moving socially, or it’s just a misfire. Personally, as somebody who enjoys playing the sport of basketball and would love to try my shot at owning an actual, tangible pair of shoes to commemorate Curry’s record, I think it’s the last one. But then again, I’m not a venture capitalist.

Now if this doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s because it doesn’t… for now. NFTs, while relatively new, are already a fundamental new-age part of young high society. You can use them as tickets to get into VIP spots, including yacht clubs, or you can simply display them in your house on a monitor.

But why don’t you just take a picture of an NFT? It’s the equivalent of taking a picture of a painting, or buying a replica painting of something such as the Mona Lisa and slapping a frame around it. Does it have the same effect? In some capacity, sure, but it’s not the Mona Lisa.

That’s sort of the idea behind collectibles in the Metaverse, like Curry’s shoes. For readers unfamiliar with it, it’s essentially a digital world where users can create an avatar and get all this cool stuff. It’s a social hub of sorts, but as Iguodala said early December on Draymond’s podcast, it seems to be the direction the world is moving: There’s server space in this digital universe for companies to essentially host their in-person offices online.

Is this the direction we’re heading in? Who knows, really. If a global superstar like Steph Curry is doing this kind of thing now, it very well could influence the direction people take in the near future. If multiple cultural impactors do it, then it almost certainly would have that influence. It’s sort of like Tik Tok in that sense where nobody really wants or needs it, but it’s there so people do it anyway.

And if the Silicon Valley VCs are getting NBA players in on it, then there must be something there. That doesn’t mean you should go out, make a Metaverse account, and buy these digital shoes, of course, and I’d like to explicitly state I’m not encouraging that. But hey, if we’re going that direction anyways, not a bad place to start.

(Photo credit: Cassidy Sparrow / Getty Images)