Coachella Demonstrates Power Of NFTs with New OpenSea Partnership
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The NFT sector has not found the glory of its 2022 heyday back. But, that hasn’t stopped the evolution of the tech. OpenSea has partnered with the music and arts festival Coachella to unleash three NFT collections. They offer both virtual and tangible real-life VIP experiences and merchandise. The partnership will eventually produce three collections offering different benefits and levels of exclusivity. The starter is the VIP Pass + Oasis Lounge Keepsake, which released on Tuesday at $1,499 each, capped at 1,000 NFTs. This tier involves access to a 2024 VIP Festival Pass and its new lounge with “exclusive bar benefits,” including “limited” drinks.
The next two collections will release late March and mid-April. Details on costs and utilities are not available yet. The layer-1 blockchain Avalanche will power the NFT collection, which is the eighth-largest blockchain by NFT sales volume in the past 30 days, according to CryptoSlam data. Coachella partnered with Avalanche because they’re “aligned on the product” the festival wants to build. However, it isn’t revealing any details until later this month. There have been a lot of new NFT collections since the term even gained adoption. OpenSea alone has over 2 million collections and 80 million NFTs on its marketplace, according to its website.
This isn’t the first music-related endeavor that offers real-life use. Web3 sector is changing the way its perceived, thanks to utility-driven NFTs . The word NFT used to mean sometimes overpriced, digital profile pictures (PFPs). Now it’s referring to digital pictures that also have utility on and offline. This is one of the most relevant signs that NFT marketplaces will find new users and grow sales.
CEO and co-founder of OpenSea Devin Finzer mentioned that NFT-based music and ticketed collections are one of the “best ways” for NFT to gain mainstream approval. While OpenSea has done “smaller music-related NFT projects” in the past. This one targets ticketing and VIP access, something Finzer — and others — have been planning for a long time.
“Coachella has the audience and distribution to take it to a whole other level,” Finzer added.
“The willingness to make this an NFT that is useful and valuable and something people will be excited about versus some of the things in the past NFT projects have been, maybe more half baked, this is something that is sophisticated and exciting with real world value.”
Devin Finzer
This partnership can serve as another push by OpenSea to gain back power in a saturated market. On January 1, 2022, NFT global sales volume plateaued at $23.7 billion. In the past month, NFT marketplaces saw $2.21 billion in volume, according to analytics from Tiexo.
With that said, since 2017, OpenSea has transacted over $20 billion in volume. But even with that much total volume, OpenSea isn’t the biggest NFT marketplace today. Recently, OpenSea ranked as the fourth largest. It owns 10% of the market share, which is $222.65 million. It is just behind of Blur, Magic Eden and OKX, Tiexo data showed. The project is making buying NFTs easier. Instead of needing crypto wallets, people can simply sign up through email. Email sign-ups and credit card on-ramps are growing trends for the typically inaccessible sector.
“For a long time, web3 had a usability problem,” Finzer said. But over the last three to four years, there’s been a lot of development to make them easier to understand
“We’re making it part of the experience on Coachella, so they can sign up easily and get the NFT easily.”
Devin Finzer
