TJ Keasal has been dressing up her videogame characters in new-release Nikes and Adidas since she was in middle school. Long before Fortnite let players outfit their avatars, Keasal, a 32-year-old Michigan native, would win tokens in games like NBA Live and use them to upgrade her players’ on-court style with whatever was hottest at the time, be it Air Jordan 11s or Kobe Bryant Crazy 8s.

So when she started seeing chatter on sneakerhead Twitter that people were buying sneaker non-fungible tokens and displaying them as profile pictures on their social media pages, a sense of familiarity kicked in. “Back in the day, we didn’t think of them as NFTs,” said Keasal, who doles out advice on how to build a sneaker collection to her 28,000 YouTube subscribers. But “if we’re into these brands in real life, we’re going to be into them in Web3.”

That is the theory, at least, behind major shoe brands’ recent moves into the metaverse. Last month, Nike acquired RTFKT, which creates, sells and stores virtual goods, for an undisclosed sum. Four days later, Adidas dropped 30,000 NFTs in a four-way collaboration with crypto stars Bored Ape Yacht Club, Punks Comic and Gmoney. The NFTs featured avatars of each collaborator decked out in Adidas apparel and the brand’s original shell-toe Superstars. This month, sneaker resale site StockX announced its own digital goods marketplace, Vault NFTs, which lets users buy a digital version of a limited edition sneaker (although there is heated debate on sneaker sites about how these transactions will actually work).