The $8 Million Middle Finger
Coinbase & Crypto's Refusal to Read the Room
Some tuned in for the sport. Others tuned in for the halftime show, featuring the planet’s most popular musician, Bad Bunny. Marketing leads like myself the world over tuned in for the ads.
The two best ‘football’ teams in the United States faced off on Sunday. These are elite athletes, many at the pinnacles of their careers. For many, this is the only time to secure their names in the history books, to go down as legends among their peers. Giants among mere mortals. The stakes are identical for marketers tasked with Super Bowl commercial programming this year.
These are the most expensive ad spots that US media has to offer. The biggest of the big leagues. And the effort only matches the stage. The seconds-long ad that flashes across your broadcast is a reflection of millions of man-hours of work. Tireless data analysis and focus group testing. Insights from focus groups feed the scripts refined and directed by the best artists on the planet. Ads refined hundreds of times. Frame-by-frame alterations, iterations and adjustments to touch the 100 million+ eyeballs glued to the screen. All in service of the inexact science of leaving a lasting impression on the audience.
Immortality beckons. But only if one correctly understands what matters most to the American people in this exact moment.
In steps Coinbase with a generational fumble.
The Coinbase Ad and Response
Estimated cost for putting this ad together was $20, sounds about right if you watch the video. Windows Movie Maker comes free with a laptop that’s maybe even an over-estimate. Creatively, terrible. Immortality did not, in fact, beckon. Far from a display of anyone’s best work. But the reaction to this ad was visceral.
Entire bars and watch parties booed the TV and flipped the bird. Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody” is near and dear to many people’s hearts, it was clear the song itself was not being booed.
I suppose this next bit is pretty dependent on how your Twitter algo is refined, but my feed wasn’t too happy either.
Coinbase management, however, seemed undeterred.
The whole experience had me pretty annoyed.
An opportunity to forge a connection on a massive (albeit noisy) stage was spurned
It didn’t make the crypto industry look any better
It didn’t make Coinbase look any better
Leadership was refusing to see what anyone who talks to people outside the industry has known since 2023 - retail isn’t interested, large swathes are actively hostile.
This whole exercise displayed how much of a bubble the industry is in. It feels like the dying embers of an empire holding lavish banquets to keep up appearances while the public goes hungry. Crypto Twitter, more than ever, feels like a few big accounts boosted by bots. Honestly, the disconnect I feel from the wider space has never felt so pronounced.
Where Are We, Really, As An Industry?
There were obviously big questions that I think were never asked in earnest.
Is crypto a mainstream enough product to capitalise on the biggest stage the United States has to offer?
Is crypto’s appeal as universal as Coca-Cola or ChatGPT, almost a commodity to use in daily life?
Is this a desirable lifestyle enhancement that augments one’s perception of themselves, like luxury items or a GLP-1 prescription?
Launching the ads without clear answers to these question was a colossal waste of $8 million. It reveals how crypto's metrics are almost entirely internal-facing. We measure things that matter to people already in the ecosystem - TVL, transaction volume, wallet growth. But, for an industry with fewer daily active users than Grammarly, there's almost no serious measurement of how the product is perceived by the people it supposedly wants to serve.
The Super Bowl moment was, in a way, a rare glimpse of external data. Seeing the industry explain it away rather than absorb this information really does hit home a widespread lack of accountability and self-reflection. The bottom line is that many people across the world have lost a lot of money on crypto. These were once users who are now active haters. Every day that this reality is ignored delays adoption by weeks.
Retail Never Arrived for the Last Bull Run
Here’s a screen from Benjamin Cowen’s Twitter. He’s an analyst who I deeply respect. His reasoned takes on widely-traded markets include a heavy dose of crypto. It overlays the price of Bitcoin (blue) vs the (red) “social risk,” taking into account the rate of growth of a selection of social channels. You can click the image for a more detailed methodology breakdown in the replies. He’s got millions of followers across his twitter, youtube and newsletter, and while follower count isn’t a guarantee of quality, he’s one of the few I do recommend.
The red line is basically on the floor, showing that interest in crypto across social media hasn’t been at these levels since 2017. This is despite the all-time highs we experienced at the end of 2024, with Bitcoin breaching the $120,000 mark. These highs, as shown in the image below, were not achieved on the back of market euphoria like in previous cycles.
For me, market euphoria is when friends emerge from decades of silence, asking for investment help. People who do not invest see people making bank, and they want in. This did not happen in the market peak just gone by. Retail stayed clear.
So Who is Crypto Even For at This Point?
Until this point, we have worked with the assumption that the public needs to buy into crypto in order to reach new highs. The data shows otherwise. And I think that’s a real problem, because it leads to us asking who all this technology is even for? What is a crypto person in 2026?
Are we cypherpunks, ushering in a new private money system because the 2008 financial crisis obliterated trust in banking & monetary systems? Where’s the revolutionary messaging that a space with these messages would otherwise embrace? Where’s the “show, don’t tell” of a better world we wish to put in place? And Coinbase’s previous eyebrow-raiser was the sponsoring of the first ever Presidential military parade. Not very libertarian of them to embrace war as a celebration.
Or are we the new banks, taking financialisation of every part of the world away from boardrooms and towards retail? Normal people can trade assets previously out of reach without being accredited investors, embracing stablecoin settlements for instant, dollar-backed trades. This cycle brought us more institutional-level stablecoin players than ever before (Tempo, Ethena, Klarna, Paypal, Ripple all joined since 2023).
Or are we some other thing, something completely fuelled by speculation above all else. Memecoins led to the movement pushed by Base, of Coinbase, to “coin everything.” Creators became issuers of speculative items, and their followers could then speculate. And then we can’t ignore prediction markets, probably the only resounding winners of the Super Bowl, with over $1.5 billion in bets placed across the 6 top players. Polymarket set the stage, Kalshi made it mainstream, and new markets open up every day. What we have now is a deluge of wagers on any imaginable event. For legal reasons, this isn’t betting but trading. Kalshi removed the crypto component entirely and are reaping the rewards of a lower barrier to entry. It’s a zero-friction onboarding experience, no seed phrases needed.
The industry seems to be trying everything, but is successfully landing on nothing. Coinbase’s L2 Base is the biggest case in point. Every quarter they seem to pivot.
I really don’t know where crypto goes from here. But I’m pretty certain that, with this refusal to respond to criticism, mainstream adoption is not on the cards. We’ve been talking about “being early” for so long, but this lack of humility will ensure that the right time won’t arrive.
Radical suggestion, how about we pipe down and actually listen for once.