Coinbase has paid $375 million to acquire Echo, the investment platform founded by well known crypto OG, trader, and YouTuber, Jordan Fish, a.k.a. Cobie.
The exchange’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, has also paid $25 million for an NFT that revives Cobie’s UpOnly podcast with co-host LedgerStatus.
Coinbase says it acquired Echo “to create more accessible, efficient, and transparent capital markets.” It also says that Echo will help projects raise capital directly from their communities via private sales or through a self-hosted public token sale using Sonar.
“While we’ll start with crypto token sales via Sonar, we plan to expand support to tokenized securities and real-world assets over time, leveraging Echo’s infrastructure,” Coinbase said.
Cobie said, “Echo will remain a standalone platform under its current brand for now, but we will integrate sonar’s public sale product into Coinbase.”
Echo beta testing started last year, and launched its Sonar feature in May. Sonar allows projects to host public token sales and advertise them to their followers outside of Echo which, due to legal restraints, could not originally be done under Echo’s structure.
The real-time blockchain project MegaETH is reportedly planning to launch an initial coin offering on Sonar. The firm had previously sold $10 million worth of its token privately through Echo.
It only cost $25 million to bring Up Only back
Hours before the Echo deal, Armstrong announced he’d just burned the UpOnly NFT. Cobie said earlier this year that he’d start a new series of UpOnly if somebody bought the NFT, and set the hefty $25 million price tag.
The NFT came with its own quasi-contract that Armstrong will have to abide by. It states that there will be no sponsorship rights, the hosts can call Armstrong an “idiot” for buying the NFT, and the duo may ignore the buyer for the entire duration of the eight-episode season.
Cobie suggested today that the stream will likely be broadcast on Twitch, and shot down the idea of streaming it on Coinbase’s own social media platform, Zora, since each uploaded stream would become its own tradable token.
He said he “would happily use a crypto platform if it didn’t also make you launch a token,” which also happens to rule out the memecoin platform Pump Fun.
Read more: Coinbase torched by crypto community for US army parade sponsorship
The NFT price alone breaks down to $3.1 million per episode. If we assume that every episode will be three hours long, that’s a million dollars an hour, and over $17,000 per minute.
It’s not entirely clear, however, just how legally binding the text on an NFT is, and whether or not Coinbase might push back to get some sort of promotion in there, given its bold history of advertisements.
Cobie says the new series will now also be called “Unc Only” due to the host’s “severe old age.”
“It has been three years since up only ended. I was in my 20s when it started, now I have grey hair. We will rename it Unc Only and I will spend $25m on cosmetic surgery. See ya soon,” he said.
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Source: https://protos.com/coinbase-shells-out-400m-on-cobies-podcast-and-investment-firm-echo/