Coca-Cola and Friends With Benefits Headline Base’s ‘Onchain Summer’ Web3 Festival

Let’s face it: non-fungible tokens (NFTs) aren’t having a hot girl summer.

Perhaps “Onchain Summer,” crypto exchange Coinbase’s (COIN) event to celebrate the launch of its native Base network, can help bolster the tokens’ trading volume.

Onchain Summer, 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.

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.

In a year where NFT trading volume has fallen almost 50% since January, Web3 projects are struggling to scale. Jesse Pollak, Protocols Lead at Coinbase, told CoinDesk that Onchain Summer aims to showcase how NFTs can be leveraged 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.

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.

“The world will come on-chain because of great product experiences that people all over the world build,” said Pollak. “That's where we're focused on.”

Base is an Ethereum layer 2 network built upon Optimism’s OP Stack. Last week, Coinbase made its Base public launch date official after having opened its mainnet early for developers in July who wanted to begin testing the network. However, during this testing period, an anonymous developer created the infamous BALD token on Base network, which rose to an $85 million market capitalization before plunging when its creator pulled most of the projects’ liquidity, rugging holders.

See Also: Coinbase Exec: ‘There’s No Playbook’ for Public Company Launching Blockchain