Coachella Music Festival to Launch Solana NFTs in Deal With FTX

The Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival, set to return this April after a two-year hiatus, has announced a series of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) offering on-site perks and VIP access to the event.

It’s part of a “long-term” partnership with FTX, festival officials said in a press release. FTX is the crypto exchange helmed by billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried that recently snagged a $32 billion valuation (and an $8 billion valuation for its U.S. arm).

Coachella is launching three collections at different price points, all of which are built on Solana, a relatively eco-friendly blockchain with lower fees than Ethereum. FTX introduced a Solana-based NFT marketplace last October.

The first set, called the Coachella Keys Collection, consists of just 10 tokens, each offering lifetime festival access and other VIP goodies (among them, a “celebrity chef dinner”). There’s also the Desert Reflections Collection – 1,000 tokens priced at $180 each, which buyers can redeem for a physical copy of a Coachella photo book – and the Sights and Sounds Collection, which mostly just gets you the token and audiovisual accompaniment. The Sights and Sounds NFTs are priced at $60 each, and will launch in an edition of 10,000.

“Only blockchain technology can give us the unique ability to offer tradeable lifetime passes to Coachella for the first time ever,” Coachella Innovation Lead Sam Schoonover said in a statement.

Coachella – headlined this year by Harry Styles, Billie Eilish and Kanye West – isn’t the first music festival to experiment with crypto. This past year, New York’s Governor’s Ball offered NFTs through a partnership with Coinbase.

According to a press release, an undisclosed portion of the proceeds from Coachella’s NFTs will go to three charities: GiveDirectly, Lideres Campesinas and Find Food Bank.

In an attempt to get ahead of anticipated backlash, FTX has also purchased 100,000 tons of carbon offsets.