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- 🐳 Daily Edition: Coinbase Buys UpOnly NFT for $25M, Are We Back?
🐳 Daily Edition: Coinbase Buys UpOnly NFT for $25M, Are We Back?
The $25M total means Cobie and Ledger have now become the highest-paid podcast hosts in the world at $3.1M per episode
Beluga & Will McKinnon
October 20, 2025
In partnership with
It seemed like it was going to be a quiet news day until late this afternoon when Coinbase decided to purchase the legendary “UpOnly TV” NFT for $25M. To give some background UpOnly is a podcast led by Cobie and LedgerStatus, two true OG’s of the crypto community who have been around since before Crypto Twitter was really a thing. They’ve had several insane episodes, including the one right after FTX collapsed in which Do Kwon (Founder of Luna, convicted fraudster and currently in prison) and Martin Shkreli (also convicted fraudster, served 6 years in prison) joined to discuss the ramifications of what had happened at FTX and what might happen to Sam Bankman-Fried because of it. Shkreli delivered one of the most memorable lines of that recording, telling the soon-to-be-jailed Do Kwon that “Jail’s not that bad.”
(Top left to bottom right) Cobie, Martin Shkreli, Do Kwon, Jim Talbot, LedgerStatus, Evgeny Gaevoy, Source: UpOnly Podcast
After a 3 year hiatus, UpOnly will now be returning for 8 episodes following the acquisition of their NFT. On paper, the $25M price tag means that Coinbase is effectively paying $3.1M per episode, or more than Joe Rogan makes for producing his show. It sounds crazy but I think this may turn out to be a positive return for Coinbase despite the high cost per episode: Base has been a fairly successful chain, yet has struggled to retain crypto natives in their pursuit to onboard the masses. This mostly has to do with the culture they’ve fostered there, which is focused on more “consumer” apps versus the coins and venues crypto natives enjoy trading. They’re now at the forefront of every Crypto Twitter member’s mind, and presumably will be until the 8 episodes are over, for the low price of $25M. Honestly, seems pretty based to me.
Final note, at the bottom of this edition you’ll see an advertisement for CoW Swap. We almost never accept ad offers for the Beluga Brief, but we made an exception for this one — CoW Swap has been my primary place to swap tokens on EVM chains for years, and I highly recommend using their site if you’re trading size onchain!
The Beluga intern has been hard at work gathering all the most important crypto news stories so you have them in one place!
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