Apparel brand Adidas has bought a Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT to mark its entry into the metaverse. The company has also joined hands with Bored Ape creators Yuga Labs and others.

“Today we leap Into The Metaverse with @BoredApeYC, @gmoneyNFT & @punkscomic. It’s time to enter a world of limitless possibilities,” tweeted the brand.

Adidas purchased Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT #8774 for 46 ETH, according to the blockchain data, which showed this purchase was made in September that puts the cost at more than $156k at the time.

Besides an NFT avatar, last month, Adidas collaborated with the Ethereum-based metaverse project The Sandbox.

#NewProfilePic pic.twitter.com/Dve8TbXT9k

— adidas Originals (@adidasoriginals) December 2, 2021

Rapper Pitbull is also joining the NFT space as he signed a multi-year deal with music-focused NFT platform OneOf for an undisclosed sum of money. The deal will first see Pitbull evangelize for OneOf and then later launch his own NFTs.

The Tezos-based NFT platform is backed by veteran music producer Quincy Jones which aims to serve the NFT needs of the music industry. Earlier this year, The Grammys also partnered with OneOf for a 3-year series of NFTs.

“If used to their full potential, NFTs will empower the music industry in a way few other technologies ever have,” said the OneOf team at the time.

The English Premier League is also considering a partnership with a cryptocurrency platform that provides NFTs, according to The Times. The plan is to take a “slow and cautious” approach which will be different from the fan engagement model provided by platforms like Socios, on which several Premier league teams have launched their tokens.

In the crypto industry, Animoca Brands, the company behind Axie Infinity (AXS), has partnered with Binance Smart Chain (BSC) to launch a $200 million investment program to incubate and accelerate crypto gaming startups as well as increase mainstream adoption of blockchain tech.

The new investment program will support GameFi and blockchain games, which require funding for a runway to build their products.

“Gaming is one of the strong pillars of Web 2.0, reaching billions of users,” said Gwendolyn Regina, investment director at BSC’s Accelerator Fund, in a statement. “Its large-scale real-life use case makes it one of the core focus areas for crypto’s mass adoption to onboard retail consumers into the Web 3 world.”

According to Nansen, benefiting from the popularity of Gamefi, compared with the beginning of October, the number of daily transactions has increased by nearly 170%, and the consumption of daily gas fees has increased by nearly 353%. pic.twitter.com/WJvnDgYoYS

— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) December 3, 2021

This week, digital assets platform Blockchain.com also announced that it would be launching its own NFT platform, which will be powered by the NFT marketplace OpenSea.

The platform is currently in a beta stage but is open for individuals to sign up on its waiting list.

The company aims to tackle the “same challenges” of adoption that crypto faced during its earlier days. Blockchain wants to make accessing the NFT market, which is currently too complex to be “as easy as accessing the crypto market,” it wrote in a blog post.

Crypto exchanges Coinbase and FTX.US have launched their own NFT marketplaces in October, while Binance did it before that in June.

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