Coinbase’s Onchain Summer event, which kicked off today in celebration of Base’s mainnet launch, is a series of Web3 activations across art, gaming, and music. Through the end of August, over 50 brands, including Coca-Cola, Friends With Benefits, a social decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and NFT creator platform Zora, will host NFT mints on Base network. Jesse Pollak, Protocols Lead at Coinbase, said that Onchain Summer aims to showcase how NFTs can be leveraged as a technology rather than just a speculative asset.
In addition to branded NFT offerings, Coinbase is collaborating with Prop House, an incubator linked to NFT project Nouns DAO, to give out over 100 ETH, or $186,000, in grants for developers building on Base. They’re also encouraging developers to enroll in the ETH Global Superhack, an upcoming hackathon that will offer $175,000 in rewards. To bolster community engagement around Base, Coinbase is encouraging users to bridge their ether to Base in order to mint a free NFT to commemorate the launch of the Base mainnet. According to data from Etherscan, over 125,000 individuals have minted over 30 million free NFTs so far.
Onchain Summer’s first week will feature daily mints, starting with Friends With Benefits, who will issue an NFT on Thursday designed by artist Deekay Kwon alongside pseudonymous NFT collector Cozomo de Medici. On Saturday, Coca-Cola will open a mint of digital artworks from the Masterpiece collection, with works from artists Aket, Fatma Ramadan, and Vikram Kushwah, as well as famed painters Edvard Munch, Johannes Vermeer, and Vincent van Gogh.
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 world will come on-chain because of great product experiences that people all over the world build. That’s where we’re focused on.
Coinbase’s Onchain Summer event is an effort to bolster non-fungible token (NFT) trading volume, which has fallen almost 50% since January. Through the end of August, over 50 brands will host NFT mints on Base network, and Coinbase is giving out over $186,000 in grants for developers building on Base.