Last Sunday, June 18, was the 6.18 shopping festival in China, the second largest in the country. Nike partnered with AntChain for product traceability using their blockchain combined with dynamic encrypted NFC chips embedded in the shoes. So far, more than 130,000 pairs of shoes have used the technology. AntChain is a sister company of AliPay, the largest payment app in China.

In the early days, these solutions were primarily used to authenticate that a product is original and not a knockoff. Today, most solutions, including this one, trace the origin of the product.

Nike has been exploring this type of solution for a few years, having done a proof of concept with Macy’s in the early days of the pandemic.

For now, much of Nike’s blockchain interest is around web3, non-fungible tokens, and the metaverse. It launched its .Swoosh web3 platform last year and has just announced a collaboration with EASports to include virtual footwear and clothing in its games. recently ran a advance on Twitter that today is the start of a Sneakerhunt in Fortnite.

Meanwhile, AntChain is part of the Ant Group, the company that operates AliPay. Nike’s offering uses AntChain Traceability as a Service (TaaS). It has its own proprietary blockchain. In September 2020, it launched Trusple, a blockchain-based solution for SME trade finance in partnership with several banks including Citi, Standard Chartered, and DBS Bank.

The company has been working on confidential computing and multiparty computing that allows organizations to share data to perform calculations, without revealing the data itself. Earlier this month, he unveiled a privacy-preserving computing platform.