Concertgoers at this year’s Coachella Music Festival can earn perks and upgrades by playing a blockchain-based game called Coachella Quests, developed by Ava Labs, the company behind the Avalanche blockchain.
Coachella attendees who complete quests at the event and on the Coachella Discord server will earn “stamps” and points that can be redeemed for exclusive festival benefits and experiences, including access to the Oasis VIP lounge, unreleased music and more, including a rare NFT that comes with two 2025 festival guest passes.
In return, Coachella organizers gain insight into what gaming guests are doing during the event.
“[The Quest] is related to the festival experience and different partners, artists and locations at the festival, and can see where you complete the challenge,” said Coachella Innovation Lead Sam Schoonover. Declutter. “Once you do that, you earn stamps, which are NFT tokens that not only capture your experience at the show, but also tell Coachella a little more about consumers and what they do at the festival.”
Coachella today releases the Coachella Canvas app, which powers the Avalanche-enhanced experience at the festival. Attendees can create a Canvas Card, which acts as a personal passport, and document their experiences at Coachella. Schoonover added that all rules for completing the quests and details on how to redeem prizes will be posted alongside the festival program at launch.
“The real goal behind the program is to engage users,” added Paul Chodirker, Director of Enterprise Business Development at Ava Lab. “It is not intended to store data or to find out exactly who these people are. The intention is that visitors who have already purchased the ticket and are already going to enjoy the festival will have a better experience.”
The collaboration with Ava Labs is not Coachella’s first foray into Web3. In February 2022, Coachella partnered with defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX US to auction a lifetime pass as an NFT on the Solana blockchain, along with other collectibles. After FTX collapsed the following November, Coachella said it was working on a plan to help customers who had spent more than $1.5 million on NFTs stranded on the FTX platform following the exchange’s bankruptcy filing.
DANCE
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Last month, Ava Labs partnered with the Coachella Music Festival to launch a collection of 1,000 digital collectibles on the OpenSea marketplace called The VIP Pass + Oasis Lounge Keepsake. This year’s Avalanche NFT came with a VIP Festival Pass, plus access to the titular lounge with free drinks and other amenities.
Launched in September 2020 by Ava Labs, Avalanche is a blockchain platform that supports smart contracts and decentralized applications. It touts high data throughput, low latency, and the ability to confirm transactions in less than a second. Ava Labs is confident the chain can handle the Coachella live experience.
“The way our consensus mechanism is designed is such that we can handle a major festival like Coachella, with hundreds of thousands of attendees and transactions that can run smoothly on our network, without any downtime,” said Chodirker. “We’ve proven that over the years with our technology, so that’s a big reason why I think this is a great partnership.”
According to Chodirker, Ava Labs wanted to simplify the user experience and allow users to easily log in using email or social media. After completing quests, Chodirker continued, stamps will automatically appear on their canvas map. The card turns into a dynamic NFT, which collects stamps as users complete tasks.
Schoonover said that while a robust blockchain is important, it’s not what fans ultimately care about.
“Fans don’t know it’s an NFT, but we don’t care that it’s an NFT because the fan’s privacy is still protected, but we can know more about what people want to do on the festival side,” said he. “It’s like a new version of one [web browser] cookie.
“But fans aren’t going to play with that if they have to pay money for it, and that’s why Avalanche has a number of different technologies that we use to ensure fans don’t have to spend money and tokens can still be used. are minted and stored on the blockchain,” he continued. “I think that’s really why we wanted to work with Avalanche.”
As Chodirker explained, Avalanche at Coachella will have an activation hub for the Coachella Quest program to help with setup and get players started. With connectivity being a common issue at outdoor concerts, Chodirker expects visitors will be drawn to the Avalanche hub and learn about the project when they look for Wi-Fi.
“Other than participating in the program, I think we’re probably going to have a pretty large group of people wanting to use a stronger Wi-Fi signal near the hub,” Chodirker said. “Our technical team works 24/7 to ensure everything runs smoothly.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.