On his march to kill a billion people on-chain, Coinbase goes where few crypto brands have gone before: the supermarket.
Over the next six months in the United States, boxes of Liquid Death – the popular brand of canned water – will feature prominent advertisements for Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 scaling network.
QR codes on the boxes allow shoppers to create original works of art on the chain from various digital artists. In exchange for minting the NFTs and trying out Base, users are also eligible to win physical items from artists like Felipe Pantone and Jeff Hamilton.
While some pieces will be free to mint, others will cost between 30 cents and a few dollars, a Coinbase spokesperson said. Declutter. All proceeds generated from these sales are sent as crypto micropayments to the respective artists of the pieces.
Remember those 500,000 little @LiquidDeath billboards we bought?
This is what we used them for: bringing the world of onchain creativity to the masses as they shop for groceries. pic.twitter.com/vKlwAVAxsP
— Coinbase 🛡️ (@coinbase) August 27, 2024
“[This] serves as an easy gateway for shoppers to engage with on-chain technology, even if they don’t fully understand it yet,” the spokesperson said. “We believe that by directly connecting the experience to something as familiar as discovering a new artist, the concept and value of on-chain becomes more relatable and meaningful to the general public.”
Coinbase has won the right to advertise on 500,000 Liquid Death boxes after paying out $500,114 for the privilege in a eBay Auction earlier this year, the personal care brand Dude Wipes narrowly defeated it.
The retail push is a key part of Base’s marketing strategy, which has leveraged initiatives such as Onchain Summer reach consumers indoors creative, non-traditional ways. Much of that outreach focused on themes of democratization and an attempt to rebrand certain crypto-affiliated concepts for the masses.
The Liquid Death push, for example, is a deliberate attempt, as Coinbase readily admits, to redefine NFTs in the public eye – less so than the highly speculative and ever exorbitant realm of CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, and more as an accessible and affordable way to support artists of all stars and stripes around the world.
“The first wave of NFTs was dominated by outdated ideas about creativity,” the company said. “This is not the potential we are interested in, nor the end of the road for on-chain creativity.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward