A State of Airphoria

When the news hit of another Fortnite and Nike collaboration, it wasn’t until the teaser video showing the .SWOOSH logo that the real hype began. Many were touting this event as a Web3 adoption turning point. The “Airphoria” event had the potential to be the most considerable onboarding effort into Web3 so far, tapping into one of gaming’s largest player bases with 242 million users seen over the past 30 days.

Did the event fall flat/burst the bubble?

This collaboration introduced new Nike-themed Fortnite skins & cosmetic options in the Item Shop and a special Nike Fortnite Island of Airphoria where players could unlock the exclusive Air Max 1 ’86 Back Bling. In the event, players are tasked with helping the character Airie retrieve all five Air Max Grails that villainous Maxxed Out Max has stolen from the floating city of Airphoria. After collecting the grails across the map and playing for ten minutes, they would unlock the Back Bling.

Despite the pre-release hype and speculation, the collaboration ultimately does not involve NFT drops or other blockchain assets. However, players who connect their Epic Games account to the SWOOSH trading platform can get whitelisted for the next Air Max digital drop. After connecting SWOOSH and Epic accounts, users will receive an achievement in the form of an NFT, which will be the key to future drops. One more achievement is also available to players who have linked their accounts and purchased the Airphoria pack in-game.

Hope?

Despite the lack of in-game NFTs from this event, the potential audience for this collaboration is significant. Fortnite boasts an active player base, with 242 million players dropping in over the past 30 days. Comparing this to the blockchain titans Bitcoin and Ethereum, this is nearly 10x and 20x the number of active addresses across the same period, respectively. If we look at Polygon, the network .SWOOSH is building on, this multiple is sitting around 4800x! These multiples get even larger compared to the number of registered users on Epic, with over half a billion accounts confirmed at the beginning of 2022.

Gamer Adoption

This player base is not to be underestimated. If we start looking at adoption rates for an activation/onboarding event such as this, we begin to see some sizeable increases in blockchain active users.

We need to slow down a bit here as previous Polygon activation events, such as the Reddit Avatar program, saw very high attrition rates. Of the 9 million unique wallets that minted an avatar, only 45,247 went on to make a blockchain transaction, leading to an attrition rate of 99.5% or an adoption rate of 2%. Although the adoption rate of this event is still to be quantified, this shows the power of an effective onboarding campaign as “small” improvements lend to greater numbers of converted users.

Polygon - Web2’s Choice of Chain

While we need to wait before we see the impact of this event on the future NFTs, Nike’s decision to use Polygon highlights a clearer trend in ecosystem adoption. Polygon is no stranger to Web2 activations and is leading the charge with onboarding new users into Web3. Most of their brand partnerships so far have been around NFTs and relevant marketplaces for branded assets.

Partnerships and activation events don’t necessarily lead to a long-term active user. The first fall-off happens with the user jumping from Web2 to Web3, with the new processes involved in onboarding into the cryptoverse. Once on-chain, the new users need to interact as inactive addresses or stagnant assets do not indicate successful adoption.

Polygon Growth Continues

The companies above aren’t the only ones choosing to join the purple army. Of the brands that launched a project in 2023, 41% decided to build on Polygon, compared to 23% the year prior. A lot of this target share has been gained from the below layer, Ethereum, which was the most popular network for brands to launch on in 2022.

Polygon Scaling

These brands are opting to build on layer 2 to support blockchain scalability, furthering Polygon’s goal to become the value layer of the internet. Looking at new addresses on the network, we are yet to see another spike, as we did back in November 2022 following the Meta collaboration announcement. The most recent spike we’ve seen in new addresses followed Polygon’s announcement of Polygon 2.0, and we’ve continued to see the TVL grow zkEVM since its launch.

Conclusion

Although the collaboration between Nike and Fortnite may not have had the historical impact that many of us gamers and Web3 nerds had hoped for, it has given us a glimpse of the potential of tapping into these large player bases.

Polygon appears to be an ideal foundation not only for Web2 games looking to launch on blockchain but also for many other brands across sports, media, entertainment, and healthcare, to name a few. With the roadmap for Polygon 2.0 in flight and updates being announced weekly, the ecosystem will be one to watch out for. At the time of writing, Polygon is the largest layer 2 in crypto.

Zooming further out, it’s estimated that there are 3.75 billion video game players globally. If we disregard any gamers already participating in crypto and onboard just 8% of the global player base, we will double the current number of crypto users globally.