TL;DR Breakdown
- Coinbase staged a marketing scheme on the US most popular sports game SuperBowl
- The move attracted more traffic to the platform than expected causing a stir in its operations but was shortly fixed
Coinbase’s marketing initiative during Super Bowl became so popular that the exchange experienced an outage. Shortly after, the problem was solved. Coinbase’s Super Bowl ad pitched how easy it is to buy, sell and store cryptocurrency on its platform.
The Super Bowl upshorts
The public-traded cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, recently released its 30-second long commercial aimed at attracting new customers during the Super Bowl, one of the largest and most-watched broadcasts in American television history. Given the large audience at the Super Bowl, the exchange recorded a spike in users.
The ad was very well-received by the cryptocurrency community, many of whom have been waiting for a big company like Coinbase to advertise their product on such an enormous stage. The usual trickle of new users is expected in the wake of such advertising efforts. However, Coinbase experienced some issues during and after the Super Bowl that were likely caused by a large influx of new users.
Coinbase started experiencing issues a few hours before the Super Bowl began and experienced problems throughout Sunday night, including periods of downtime that lasted up to an hour, leading many to believe that it may have been caused by the high volume of traffic generated from their commercial during the Super Bowl. In addition, other platforms were also under heavy load and experienced downtime, such as the Philidelphia Eagles’ mobile app.
The issue was solved on Monday morning. It is unclear whether traders were affected by the outage, but it shows how many people are interested in investing or using cryptocurrencies with the exchange. This may indicate that cryptocurrency has found its way into the mainstream and has become a part of popular culture.
Coinbase went ahead, notifying its followers through tweets and a blog post regarding the incident. “You may be aware that earlier today we experienced some downtime across all Coinbase products due to heavy traffic and trading. Our engineering team has been working non-stop to resolve this issue and return site functionality for our customers.”
Coinbase advances further
Coinbase has registered a couple of major moves recently in the cryptocurrency market since the beginning of this year. Early this January, Coinbase formed a PAC with the end goal of “monitoring threats and helping pro-crypto candidates get elected at all levels of government.”
Coinbase recently received a large investment from a major U.S. financial institution and is set to offer crypto-based securities in the future. It has also been reported that Coinbase will list some coins on its platform for free in what is referred to as the “Coinbase Bundle.”
Crypto firms in SuperBowl
With crypto advertising frequently appearing throughout the event, the Super Bowl has become known as the “Crypto Bowl.” The Super Bowl is the most-watched annual sports event in the United States. That’s why this year, crypto exchanges and firms have spent millions on ad deals to gain hundreds of thousands of views.
The advertising board in this year’s Super Bowl has been dominated by crypto exchanges like Coinbase, FTX, and Crypto.com.The Sports Betting Exchange, which lists the likes of HitBTC and Gemini in addition to FXTM, has spent over $7 million for each 30-second ad position. These commercials will be shown during the game’s commercial breaks and on highlight shows.
Furthermore, the Super Bowl announced that fans would be given free NFTs for each ticket they bought until the event day.FTX.US had announced that it would give away $484,000 in Bitcoin during the Super Bowl LVI to a select group of its investors. The firm stated that it would reward its investors with $50,000 worth of Bitcoin if they purchased at least 1 million shares before Wednesday, February 23rd.
