Coinbase just took up a famous joke offer, purchasing another season of the UpOnly podcast for $25 million. The hosts promised to release eight more episodes if a benefactor purchased a unique NFT.
Bizarrely, the exchange actually overpaid UpOnly’s asking price by $5 million. Although it won’t gain any advertising privileges or creative control over the program, Coinbase has distracted the community from its ongoing technical difficulties.
Coinbase Renews UpOnly Podcast
UpOnly, a popular crypto podcast, ended several months ago, but one of its co-hosts created a bizarre challenge: if anyone purchased a $20 million NFT, the program would return for another season.
The offer contained stipulations such as a lack of sponsorship rights, editorial control, etc for the program, but it would resurrect the podcast.
In an incredible development, an unlikely buyer actually took the hosts up on this joke offer. Not only did Coinbase purchase UpOnly’s NFT, but the popular exchange actually overpaid the asking price by $5 million.
Coinbase Buys UpOnly Renewal. Source: EtherScan
Since this took place, the crypto community has been in an absolute uproar. Jordan Fish, the UpOnly co-host who first minted the NFT, conveyed his disbelief at Coinbase’s purchase quite succinctly.
Quite frankly, no one expected this to actually happen. We aren’t sure why Coinbase decided to spend $25 million on eight new episodes of UpOnly, but it seems like a PR stunt.
The podcast stipulated that it retains full freedom to ignore Coinbase’s generosity, or even make fun of the company during its airtime. Nonetheless, the new season will launch.
One Big Publicity Stunt?
Still, as far as PR stunts go, this is a pretty inventive one. Plus, a little outside context might help explain why Coinbase picked today to renew UpOnly.
The exchange has suffered intense technical difficulties today as the AWS outage took down its premium trading platform and other services.
After several hours of working on it, issues still persist. The firm even warned that some Base users may see their account balances as 0 for some tokens, so there are serious bugs remaining unfixed.
Now, however, Coinbase has got the crypto community to talk about UpOnly instead of its serious infrastructure issues. Considering that the exchange has billions in annual revenue, $25 million seems like a small price to change the narrative.
Plus, it may even get to have a company representative as a guest on the new podcast.
Whatever Coinbase’s motivation may be, this UpOnly NFT is a truly comical incident. Hopefully, its hosts won’t begrudge their new benefactor for making them resurrect the cancelled program.
