Coinbase

Designing Coinbase’s IRL web3 scavenger hunt for Art Basel

Web3

Design

The landing page for the Base Hunt web app, with a background image of a silhouetted woman in sunglasses and a text overlay with information about participating in the web3 game.

An NFT available to mint on the Onchain Summer landing page, featuring an astronaut from the Cosmic Entity Space Voyager collection by OpenSea.

Coinbase (Onchain Summer)

The landing page for the Women Techmakers Story Map, featuring the top of a globe with avatars of women placed in different locations in the world.

Coming up

Google

Our Impact

We designed and helped build the mobile and desktop experience for Coinbase’s Base Hunt, an IRL and virtual onchain scavenger hunt taking place at Art Basel 2023 in Miami Beach.

6.5K+ players, including new users who onboarded with Coinbase Wallet to participate fully
A gamified way for users to interact with web3 as part of events and in everyday life
The massively successful event paved the way for similar games at future crypto events

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After becoming one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, Coinbase launched Base, its Ethereum L2.

Following the success of Onchain Summer 2023, Coinbase wanted to continue driving awareness and inviting new users to Base.

THE VISION

Base Hunt would be an onchain game during Art Basel, the renowned international art fair. Participants could find posters at different activations and booths around Miami, scan them to collect and mint NFTs, and visit Coinbase’s activation, Base House, to redeem merch and participate in other onchain art events.

WHY LAZER?

After partnering with us for Onchain Summer, Coinbase approached us to keep the Base momentum rolling. They had seen first-hand how fast we worked with web3; with only six weeks until Art Basel, we had the expertise to support their team in bringing an onchain game to the physical world.

Visit Base Hunt

platform

Web
Coinbase
Vercel
Supabase

expertise

Frontend Development
Web3 Development
Integrations
UI/UX Design

stage

Public

investors

Andreessen Horowitz
Initialized Capital
Union Square Ventures (USV)
Ribbit Capital

Approach

Designing the game’s home base

We designed the Base Hunt dapp, which hosted NFT art that users could collect by scanning QR codes in-person and minting online.

Users would primarily be attendees of Art Basel and the majority of the NFTs needed to be found throughout Miami.

It was important that web3 newbies could easily connect their Coinbase Wallet and participate in the game. Users could view their NFT art collection in the dapp, with location information to help them explore the city and find the ones they still had to claim.

With not long until the event, we had base wireframes ready for Coinbase’s feedback within days of kicking off this project. It was a really iterative process and we continued to adapt the design to reflect the game mechanics as they were finalized.

Approach

Building the treasure hunt

Integrations for in-person minting: The in-person collection was gated to Coinbase Wallet users. When they opened their phone camera and scanned a QR code, the URL communicated the NFT being scanned to the dapp. Through the dapp’s integration with Base, it would automatically mint that NFT and show it in their collection.

Mapping unclaimed NFTs: The dapp allowed the users to track their claimed and unclaimed NFTs. They could follow the map to each location to claim the exclusive in-person NFTs. Once an NFT was minted, they could see it in the dapp alongside info about the art and artist.

Approach

Leaderboards and merch rewards

NFTs earned the user points and contributed to their ranking on the leaderboard. Each user could see how many NFTs they needed to reach the next level of the game, and levels could be used to unlock exclusive merch and discounts at the Base House onchain merch store. Other onchain actions, such as buying merch or coffee at Base House, could earn them point boosts.

Revealing the mystery artist

‍The dapp featured a collaborative quest that required players to pool their points to help each other unlock the “final boss,” a rare mystery artwork for all participants. Players could track total progress towards unlocking this reward via the dapp or through a physical exhibit at Base House that slowly revealed the artwork as more points were accrued in the pool.

These were the early days of building on Base, but we figured it out pretty quickly thanks to our collaboration with the talented engineering team at Coinbase and our experience building Base’s launch event.