The private members’ club no one talks about
ENDLESS column inches were filled this week on the Garrick Club. Members of the 192-year-old association were horrified to discover that it didn’t admit women and rushed to overturn the rule.
But Spy reckons there’s another private members’ club that deserves some attention. Two years ago, plans were unveiled for a glamorous new space for City execs: Coin Club. In lieu of a membership card, applicants would purchase “Fat Cat” NFTs, to gain entry. The tokens, cartoons of cats, below, had to be bought using Ethereum for £15,000 each.
Prospective members were promised a five-floor venue “in a former bank building [and] including a roof terrace with views over the Square Mile, gallery space exhibiting both analogue and digital art and a basement nightclub with a roster of big-name DJs.” Fine dining would be on offer in the “Coin Restaurant”, with “cordon bleu Japanese cuisine”.
Founder Adriano Karok, a Berlin-based nightclub owner, said the site would open in 2023 and boasted that more venues could soon follow in Paris, New York and Tokyo.
The plans attracted a gushing write-up in City AM, which described the club as “a heavyweight addition to clubland”. “Adriano Karok, steeped in both events and financial services and with a broad, easy smile, makes success sound like the simplest thing in the world,” the paper wrote. The FT also covered the plans, albeit with less enthusiasm. The Standard interviewed Mr Karok, but opted not to publish anything, at least not until nearer the opening date for the club. That date never came. Not long after an NFT launch party in June, the club seemed to vanish and the website disappeared. It’s not clear whether a lease on a London venue was ever signed. Coin Club Group Limited, of which Mr Karok, left, was a director, was dissolved in August last year without ever having filed accounts. A reverse image search of the cats brings up just a few social media posts by the business, and Spy could find no trace of them on OpenSea, a popular NFT marketplace. So what happened? Were there not enough people willing to pay £15k for a picture of a cat to get the project off the ground? Or were the organisers having kittens about its viability after the collapse in crypto prices later in 2022? We may never know. The firm’s PR representatives told Spy they parted ways with the founders soon after the launch party, citing organisational difficulties.