Photo Credit: Coachella / OpenSea
Coachella is dipping its toes into NFT offerings again—despite the disastrous FTX partnership that featured ‘lifetime’ tickets. Here’s the latest.
Coachella has announced it is teaming up with OpenSea to offer NFTs to concert goers—again. That didn’t go so well last time after cryptocurrency exchange FTX went belly-up and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2022. That NFT drop offered 10 lifetime festival passes as an NFT—which became worthless in the FTX bankruptcy. The Coachella NFT Discord server filled up with complaints that users could not transfer their NFTs from their FTX wallets.
“We do not currently have any lines of communication with the FTX team,” a Coachella server administrator told those buyers at the time. “We have assembled an internal team to come up with solutions based on the tools we have access to. Our priority is getting Coachella NFTs off of FTX, which appears to be disabled at the moment.”
Coachella wasn’t the only live music festival effected by the debacle. Tomorrowland also offered an NFT drop through FTX, with those NFTs becoming unavailable as the platform wound its way through bankruptcy proceedings. Both of those initiatives were based on the Solana blockchain, which received significant investment from venture capital backers.
Coachella’s new NFT effort with OpenSea as a partner will use the Avalanche blockchain network—a complete abandonment of Solana. These new Coachella Keepsakes are a series of three NFT collections with what it calls “tangible, in-your-hands, VIP experiences and merchandise.”
“From exclusive access to the festival’s most coveted spots like the Rose Garden or the new Oasis Lounge to limited edition Coachella merchandise, these NFTs are your all access pass to some of the festival’s most exclusive offerings,” the press release reads.
“Our collaboration with OpenSea begins a new chapter in how we use NFTs to provide unique custom experiences for Coachella in real-life an online,” adds Sam Schoonover, Innovation Lead for Coachella. “We’re moving towards a future where Coachella isn’t just an event you attend—but an experience you can own and shape based on digital tokens in your possession.”
That last bit is really important—if you do plan on buying a Coachella NFT you should read about self-custodial wallets. Part of the reason those first FTX NFTs failed is because they remained in the bankrupt company’s possession as the platform collapsed. OpenSea has been around in the web3 space for a while—but there’s no guarantee a web3 crash wouldn’t send it into the brink, too.