Puma Enters NFT World With Puma.eth Domain

JAKARTA – Shoe manufacturer Puma is becoming a big brand that has started to join in on buying decentralized URLs and disclosing their nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Puma has also changed their Twitter account to Puma.eth. The German sportswear brand registered the Ethereum Name Service, or ENS, domain name.

Another big company buying .ETH domains is Budweiser, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev, which now bought Beer.eth through ENS on OpenSea for 30 ETH last year. When fast food chain White Castle listed whitecastleofficial.eth, the former director of operations for ENS even tweeted about his excitement.

All .ETH names are NFTs that can be "easily plugged into the ever-expanding NFT ecosystem," as the ENS Medium post says. Some of the benefits of the ENS name are that it can accept cryptocurrency, token, or blockchain-based assets, in addition to being able to point to a decentralized website and to store profile information such as avatars, email addresses, or Twitter accounts.

The ENS Puma name is one of several NFT-related moves the company has taken recently. According to Puma.eth's OpenSea page, Puma has invested in various cat-inspired NFT collections including NFT Cool Cats, Lazy Lions, Gutter Cat Gang and CatBlox.

At the time of publication, Puma was ranked 13th on the .eth Leaderboard, which lists the most followed Twitter accounts with the .ETH name. In the first place is parishilton.eth, which is owned by celebrity Paris Hilton. In second was shaq.eth, which is owned by former NBA player Shaquille O'Neal.

Puma is one of the biggest global sportswear brands along with Nike and Adidas, who have made their own entry into the Web3 space with a major breakthrough. Nike acquires the shoe brand and virtual collection RTFKT. Meanwhile, Adidas Original launched an NFT collaboration with Bored Ape Yacht Club, PUNKS Comic, and gmoney.

The Ethereum Name Service has a total of 724,096 ENS names created at the time of writing, according to Dune Analytics. The highest number of monthly registrations occurred in recent months.

ENS's competitor, Unstoppable Domains, has more than 2 million registered domains, according to the company's website. Recently they also launched a single login service for Ethereum and Polygon called Login. As more and more DApps, wallets, exchanges, and marketplaces support NFT usernames, Web 3 users are increasingly adopting decentralized URLs for digital identities.