Japan’s Casio Watch Brand Takes its G-Shock Line to Metaverse with Polygon

Casio, the 77-year-old watch brand founded in Japan, is giving a Web3 twist to its brand by bringing its sporty G-Shock wrist-watch line to the metaverse. In partnership with eco-friendly blockchain Polygon, Casio is set to launch a collection of 15,000 free-to-mint G-Shock Creator Pass NFTs on September 23. These NFTs will act like a gate pass to Casio’s new Discord channel via which, holders will be able to enter a contest to co-create potential designs for the passes.

Casio wishes to leverage the growing buzz around Web3 in order to engage with a younger, more tech-savvy consumer base with this metaverse foray. The brand is hence, taking a community-building approach to establish itself prominently in the virtual world.

“Co-creative projects include the G-Shock Creator Pass Colour Design Contest that will determine the pass design (colours, materials, and patterns). Submitted designs will be voted on by community members, and the winning entry will become the design for the actual pass,” Casio wrote in an official statement, detailing its intentions with this contest.

The 15,000 creator pass NFTs will be made available in Japan, India, the US, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, and the UK among a few more nations. An announcement about this upcoming Casio competition has been published on X (formerly Twitter) as well.

Takahashi Oh, senior general manager of Casio’s timepiece division has said that the demand for experiences in the Web3 has increased, as per a report by Decrypt.

“The co-creation of the Virtual G-Shock Project aims to foster a culture of wearing watches in the virtual world,” the report quoted Oh as saying.

The metaverse now has over 400 million unique average monthly users worldwide, an estimate by ByBit Learn said in February. Interestingly, 51 percent of the global metaverse users are aged 13 or under and most of them are either taking virtual classes or playing video games in these blockchain-based digital ecosystems.

Several brands are trying to set up shops in these virtual universes to tap into the potential userbase it could fetch from this age group. Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas, Nike, and Starbucks are among other brands that have also forayed into the metaverse sector.