Red Bull Racing Launch Onchain Fan Engagement

Oracle Red Bull Racing's Onchain Initiative 🏎️

Oracle Red Bull Racing have partnered with crypto exchange Gate[dot]io (Gate) and Ethereum layer 2 solution Abstract to launch "In the Moment" - a series of 24 digital collectibles tied to the 2025 F1 season.

Six digital artists are contributing to the project: Timpers, DutchTide, ALIENQUEEN, Antoine Mingo, MendezMendez, and 0009.eth.

How the Campaign Works 🎨 

The "In the Moment" series consists of 24 free digital collectibles commemorating iconic Oracle Red Bull Racing moments. These are distributed across four drop windows, each containing six collectibles:

• Monaco: May 23rd-29th

• Silverstone: July 4th-10th

• Singapore: October 3rd-9th

• Abu Dhabi: December 5th-11th

Users can collect base editions for free during each window, although paid collectibles are also available. Premium Silver and Golden editions introduce rarity tiers with additional features, including claimable rewards and enhanced collection tracking capabilities. Completing full sets during drop windows provides chances to win exclusive prizes, though specific reward structures haven't been detailed.

The onboarding is simple for most native crypto users, or for Gate account holders, but the default option is still to ‘Connect Wallet’.

For free collectibles, fans are required to engage in an array of social-based tasks, and for premium, more rare collectibles, fans can choose to pay.

So far the activation has been a big success, with almost 900,000 NFT mints, and almost $150,000 in sales volume in 3 days so far. The total unique minters (fans that have minted NFTs) is at 188,000, which is again impressive after 3 days.

The daily sales volume has come at about a 4:1 ratio to the count, meaning the average transaction has cost ~ $4.

The program has so far seen a great volume of users, and is seeing some traction in sales, which is great to see after just 3 days of activity.

Analysis & Concluding Thoughts 🧠

This is a change for Red Bull Racing’s Web3 strategy.

Their previous NFT-based campaign, Velocity, focused on high-end digital art sold for big price points by big-name digital artists.

With "In the Moment," they're focusing on lowering the barrier to entry and trying to go for scale, rather than looking at revenue.

The big similarity between Velocity and the "In the Moment" series is that there are three parties involved in both of these activations. In this specific example, we have (1) Abstract, the infrastructure layer/tech vendor, (2) Gate, the exchange who are sponsoring (3) Red Bull Racing, and no doubt footing the bill for this. With Velocity, there was (1) Red Bull Racing, (2) Bybit, the exchange, and then (3) AOI, who are an emerging art and technology business. So again, you had the tech arm with the exchange footing the bill, and then the rights holder themselves.

I like the fact that Red Bull are trying to lower the barrier to entry and pursuing ongoing engagement throughout the racing season, rather than executing one-time activations. This has shown success previously with McLaren, for example. Their "23 of 23" throughout the 2023 F1 season had over 2.8 million mints from hundreds of thousands of users.

More recently, we've seen the likes of Momentum by the ATP tour garner 75,000 users with over 750,000 mints throughout the Nitto ATP Finals in Turin in late 2024.

Clearly, there is a market for NFT based digital fan engagement in sports, for free or low cost, with the view to monetising in another way.

Room For Improvement

Although this is a very successful campaign so far by Red Bull Racing and its partners, I still think there is room for improvement.

There is no unified single sign-on, and there are a variety of ways that users can come in, connect or create an account to mint the items. This is of course the case for most account creation user experience pathways, but their users are predominantly picking between Google, Facebook, Apple and co — companies with ginormous digital footprints. Not many regular people have crypto wallets, on the other hand.

I think that this is potentially a byproduct of having three parties involved.

Gate want to have users in their Telegram channel, and want fans posting on socials to get these free collectibles. Red Bull want to grow their Discord, satisfy their sponsor Gate, and Abstract want to see onchain activity. It’s difficult to balance everything here, with one activation.

There are also gas fees involved. So the free collectibles are indeed free, but also have gas fees involved. I would have liked to see this abstracted away (no pun intended).

In fairness to the parties involved, I think that it's very difficult to create a unified user experience when you do have these three parties involved, as there is a battle for first party data and priorities (Gate = accounts, Abstract = transactions, Red Bull = Discord community). I think that this probably hinders the transactions onchain, the revenue and the first-party data that can be accrued here for all parties, and I think that will realised down the line.

Overall, this is a huge step in the right direction for Red Bull and their partners, and it'll be very interesting to see what they do with this huge onchain network for fans that they are creating, and who leads the way going forward, within this trifecta of parties.

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