Nike gets a patent to tokenize shoes on Ethereum blockchain

Sports footwear firm Nike recently announced that it has obtained a patent to tokenize its shoes on the Ethereum blockchain. On December 10, in a document that was posted on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Nike stated that it's planning to generate unique IDs and create ERC 721 tokens for some shoes, dubbed CryptoKicks. 

While purchasing shoes, customers will be able to "unlock" these tokens and link them with their unique IDs to confirm ownership. The token will be used as a representative of a digital shoe and to record the "genotype" data of a digital shoe. This information will include colors, specific attributes, styles and so on. The systems aims to facilitate a way to ensure the authenticity of the goods, as per the patent.

Prospective and current owners [...] may buy and sell digital assets through one or more blockchain ledgers operating on the decentralized computing system. [...] By way of example, and not limitation, a user may buy a new pair of highly sought after sneakers from a verified vendor who may provide authenticated provenance records for the sneakers. [...] After receiving the shoe box containing the purchased sneakers, the user scans the box UPC with a barcode scan feature in a sneakers app operating on the user's smartphone.

Nike also suggested that token generation may be linked to the shoe sales. This would also make way for verification of the scarcity of the shoes in circulation. 

The patent read:

When a consumer buys a genuine pair of shoes a digital representation of a show may be generated, linked with the consumer, and assigned a cryptographic token, where the digital shoe and cryptographic token collectively represent a ‘CryptoKick.

When the apparel is sold, the ownership of the token can be passed alongside of the sold product. The property of those tokens would be managed in a dedicated app. The patent also suggests that the shoes can be bred. 

Using the digital asset, the buyer is enabled to securely trade or sell the tangible pair of shoes, trade or sell the digital shoe, store the digital shoe in a cryptocurrency wallet or other digital blockchain locker, intermingle or "breed" the digital shoe with another digital shoe to create "shoe offspring," and, based on rules of acceptable shoe manufacturability, have the newly bred shoe offspring custom made as a new, tangible pair of shoes.