Onchain Summer is celebrating the launch of Coinbase’s new Layer 2 network, Base, with multiple events each week.
Coca-Cola and popular DAOs such as Friends With Benefits and Nouns participate in various activations.
Let’s face it: non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are not having a hot girly summer.
Perhaps ‘Onchain Summer’, Coinbase’s (COIN) crypto exchange event to celebrate the launch of its own Base network, can help bolster the tokens’ trading volume.
Launched today to celebrate the launch of Base’s mainnet, Onchain Summer is a series of Web3 activations spanning the arts, gaming and music. By the end of August, more than 50 brands, including Coca-Cola, Friends With Benefits, a Social Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), and the NFT creator platform Zora will host NFT mints on the Base network.
In addition to branded NFT offerings, Coinbase is partnering with Prop House, an incubator linked to NFT project Nouns DAO, to distribute more than 100 ETH, or $186,000, in grants for developers building on Base. They are also encouraging developers to sign up for the ETH Global Superhack, an upcoming hackathon that will net $175,000 in rewards.
To strengthen community engagement around Base, Coinbase is encouraging users to bridge their ether to Base to earn a free NFT commemorating the launch of the Base mainnet. According to data from Etherscan, more than 125,000 individuals have hit more than 30 million free NFTs to date.
In a year where NFT trading volume has dropped nearly 50% since January, Web3 projects are struggling to scale. Jesse Pollak, Protocols Lead at Coinbase, told CoinDesk that Onchain wants to show Summer how NFTs can be used as a technology rather than just a speculative asset.
“We wanted to give people a reason to be on-chain this summer and set up their first wallet and experience this future,” said Pollak.
The first week of Onchain Summer features daily mints, starting with Friends With Benefits, which will release an NFT on Thursday designed by artist Deekay Kwon along with pseudonymous NFT collector Cozomo de Medici. On Saturday, Coca-Cola will open a collection of digital artwork from the Masterpiece Collection, featuring works by artists Aket, Fatma Ramadan and Vikram Kushwah, as well as renowned painters Edvard Munch, Johannes Vermeer and Vincent van Gogh.
“The world will come on-chain because of great product experiences people are building around the world,” said Pollak. “That’s what we’re focusing on.”
Base is an Ethereum Layer 2 network built on Optimism’s OP Stack. Last week, Coinbase made Base’s public launch date official after it opened its mainnet early in July to developers who wanted to start testing the network. However, during this testing period, an anonymous developer created the infamous BALD token on the Base network, which rose to a market cap of $85 million before plummeting as the creator took away most of the project’s liquidity, backing holders. Also see: Coinbase Exec: ‘There Is No Playbook’ For Public Companies Launching Blockchain
