Eight episodes of a podcast? How much could that cost, 25 million dollars?
Earlier this year, crypto influencer and investor Cobie (real name Jordan Fish) created a non-fungible token (NFT) related to a defunct podcast he co-hosted with the pseudonymous Ledger during the 2021 crypto bull run and eventual collapse. Yesterday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the crypto exchange had purchased this NFT, which cost $25 million (paid via the USDC stablecoin).
According to public statements made by Cobie around the time the NFT was created, the point of the token’s creation was to give anyone who purchased it the power to force Cobie and Ledger to bring back their old podcast, known as Up Only, for eight new episodes. Of course, since this was an NFT without any actual legal contract associated with it, it’s unclear whether the purchase of the token would actually bind the co-hosts to bring back to the podcast under the law.
Just burnt the NFT. Your move @UpOnlyTV @Cobie @ledgerstatus. https://t.co/fuK634sdWn
Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) October 21, 2025
After making the purchase, Coinbase provably burned the NFT—basically a way of transparently removing ownership of it. A few hours later, it became clear that this was mostly just a marketing stunt around Coinbase’s $375 million acquisition of crypto-focused early-stage investment platform Echo, which was founded by Fish in 2023.
Echo is an investment platform that is intended to make fundraising in crypto projects and startups more transparent and inclusive. Throughout crypto’s history, there have been many instances of insiders launching new tokens to dump on the wider public at a later date, so Echo was effectively an attempt to push back on that sort of activity.
