Today marks the official start of Onchain Summer according to Base, the new Ethereum-based layer-2 blockchain that launched in its test phase in February. After months of development, today Base is launching to the public at large to coincide with its Onchain Summer campaign.
What’s Onchain Summer? It’s a multi-week celebration of onchain art, gaming, music, and more, powered by Base. The folks behind the campaign entreat: “Visit every day for onchain drops that will brighten your summer. It kicks off on August 9th at onchainsummer.xyz.”
I caught last week’s episode of the Chain Reaction podcast with Jesse Pollak, lead for Base and head of protocols at Coinbase, who offered a rosy assessment of the long-term outlook for NFTs, crypto and Web3.
At Expressions, our vision aligns with the precepts and ethos outlined by Jesse, and our development team will take a look at offering Base as an option for creatives. For now, let’s hear how Jesse lays out his vision of Onchain Summer:
As we were thinking about how we wanted to bring Base into the world, what we started seeing organically over the last few months is that on-chain activity has really started growing. If you look at the number of transactions on Ethereum and layer two, those have been growing really, really quickly. If you look at the use cases that people are starting to build — from on-chain media, to on-chain music, to on-chain food to on-chain games over just the last six to nine months — I think that that the breadth and diversity of use cases have really started to be mind-boggling.As we were bringing Base into mainnet, we saw the opportunity to help tell that story. Basically, hey, folks have thought about crypto for the last decade as this thing that is speculative and financial and technical and scary, but really recently that shifted and now crypto is fun. And it’s engaging. And it’s like consumer products that you know and love that are built on this incredibly powerful platform where you’re in control and where you own your own assets, you own your own destiny. And so that’s really the story of Onchain Summer.
The story includes the big brands like Coke and Atari, who I think are at the forefront of on-chain adoption. It also includes a bunch of on-chain native crypto folks, the FWBs, the Zoras, the Manifolds, the Showtimes really all coming together to say, Here’s what’s possible. Two other ones that I’m really excited about are Blackbird — I don’t know if you’ve heard about them, but they’re building full restaurant loyalty products all on chain — and Dezi, growing really fast in cities across the country today.
[Together we’re helping] to tell the story of how this product or experience or artist or creator or business or brand is coming on chain, why they’re coming on chain, and how an everyday person can interact with that and how it can actually make their life better — how it can brighten their summer. That’s the story of Onchain Summer’s origin.
Onchain Summer is about recognizing that we are at an inflection point in the adoption of this new platform that is on chain that’s transforming the Internet as we know it, and saying, It’s time for all of us to push through that inflection point and get to the other side where we start to see week over week, month over month growth of really, really powerful use cases that are going to bring us to the next generation of our world. …
This is a story about all of the people in the crypto industry who are building the future. And it’s about lifting them up and saying the technology is finally ready. It’s finally ready for real experiences that have a real positive impact on people’s lives. And now we just need to bring it to the rest of the world. And this summer is where it’s starting.