Coinbase

Building Coinbase’s Onchain Summer, an inaugural celebration with 700K+ NFTs minted on Base

Design

Web3

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

Our Impact

We worked closely with Base, the Ethereum L2 incubating at Coinbase, to develop an app for the first Onchain Summer in August 2023.

Scaled to 145K+ users and 1.4M transactions in one day at peak
More than 700K NFTs were minted by 268K+ unique wallets‍
More than $242M USD was bridged to Base in the first two weeks

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Coinbase has established itself as one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.

Since announcing its Ethereum L2, Base, Coinbase’s mission has been to “bring the next billion users and million developers onchain.” Onchain Summer is now an annual, weeks-long celebration of onchain music, art, gaming, and more.

THE VISION

Build and design an onchain app, powered by Base, to host exclusive content for Onchain Summer 2023, a multi-week celebration of Base’s launch. It needed to feature partnerships with brands, artists, and creators, with daily NFT drops that could be minted on the app.

WHY LAZER?‍

Coinbase came to us in May and didn’t have any time to waste; summer was coming soon! Their team approached us for Onchain Summer because they needed an experienced web3 partner who could execute and iterate fast. They trusted our designers and engineers to think through the best possible user experience, and wanted us to embed with their team and help them to bring it to life.

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platform

Web
Coinbase
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Vercel
Optimism
Thirdweb
Arweave
Crossmint
Rainbow

expertise

Frontend Development
Backend Development
Web3 Development
Infrastructure Development
Integrations
UI/UX Design

stage

Public

investors

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

Our Approach

Designing and building a decentralized app (dapp) for minting NFTs required our know-how to make onboarding and wallet connection easy, and to integrate other onchain tech so the platform functions as intended.

This can take a lot of time, but we built and validated rapidly thanks to our experience and skills with the tech.

Approach

Designing a festival experience

The theme of Onchain Summer was, naturally, ☀️ summer.

Coinbase wanted a web app that evoked the excitement and vibes of a summer festival, so we centered that in our design.

And given the nature of the platform—significant NFT drops every day—it needed to be easy to use and to prominently highlight each new drop and NFT collection.

This would have been clear-cut if we were just working with Coinbase’s vision. With more than 20 NFT drops, including from major brands like Coca-Cola and Atari, we fielded lots of requests for partner drops and pages. We designed and built quickly so there was time to integrate their feedback and stay on track for each day’s launch.

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Challenge

Building for NFT ease

60-second, 1-click onboarding: This campaign was targeting everyone, not just crypto natives. We needed to make it as simple as possible for users to onboard and start using the app. In the end, we built out an onboarding process that took less than 60 seconds and removed all the potential friction between onboarding and minting a unique collection.

A custom bridge to support more than $200M: Within the first two weeks of the launch, more than $242 million USD was bridged to Base, with over 130,000 unique wallets using it each day. To make this possible, we developed a custom bridge (ETH) to Base flow using the Optimism SDK to simplify the onboarding experience.

An NFT being minted in the Onchain Summer web app. The user has confirmed the transaction with their wallet but it hasn't been processed yet.

approach

Dead-simple wallet creation and minting

We integrated many of the industry’s most important web3 tech, like Wagmi, Thirdweb, Rainbow, and Crossmint, to make the app buttery smooth for users to create wallets and mint NFTs. This made it easy for people with any level of familiarity.

Custom features for partners and users

We adapted quickly to build custom design assets and features for partners. The users wanted analytics, so we integrated Mint.fun to show them the most popular NFTs.

While Coinbase got more than 268K unique wallets on Base, brand partners also saw returns, with Coca-Cola making more than $500K on their NFT collection.

We partnered with Coinbase each step of the way to build something that worked for everyone, and we were thrilled to be asked back to work on the 2024 iteration of Onchain Summer.

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