The History of Crypto Advertising Sponsorship: A Cycle Experiment with Buying Attention and Legitimacy

In February 2026, when Coinbase's ads flashed again on the giant LED screens of the Super Bowl, accompanied by the Backstreet Boys' classic single and the slogan "Crypto. For everybody," the audience was met with a chorus of sighs and more negative than positive comments—a stark contrast to the frenzied night four years earlier, dubbed the "Crypto Bowl." Back then, the FTX logo was still prominently displayed above the Miami Heat's arena, and crypto companies were waving huge checks, attempting to buy decades of mainstream trust in a matter of days. However, the ensuing collapse, lawsuits, and the farce of the arena's renaming turned this "attention experiment" into one of the most expensive jokes in sports history. On the surface, it was a branding business, but in reality, it was more like a stress test: when sponsorship embeds financial narratives into the daily lives of fans and spectators, trust is amplified. Essentially, it was a long-term experiment on "how high-risk financial products can gain attention and legitimacy through highly trusted public institutions." Crypto Company Sponsorship: The Start of the "Big Spending" Era

In 2021, with the emergence of a phenomenal bull market, cryptocurrency companies, rapidly accumulating wealth, began to aggressively penetrate the sports and cultural fields. Cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain projects started directly attaching their brands to the most expensive and conspicuous public attention portals—top leagues, premier stadiums, and global sports broadcasts.

In March of that year, Miami-Dade County and FTX reached a 19-year stadium naming rights agreement, renaming the Miami Heat's home arena the FTX Arena. This deal, which incorporated a crypto company into a city landmark, marked the first large-scale entry of crypto advertising into mainstream urban public space narratives.

That same summer, Crypto.com signed a fight kit-level partnership with the UFC, reported by CNBC as a 10-year deal worth approximately $175 million. In traditional sports, this level of sponsorship is among the most core commercial assets. Then, in October, Coinbase signed a multi-year official partnership with the NBA/WNBA, with its brand logo prominently displayed on the base of basketball hoops. In November, the news of Staples Center being renamed Crypto.com Arena further reinforced this expansion beyond its core market. This arena is not only the home of the Los Angeles Lakers, a powerhouse team, but also a super landmark for Los Angeles' performance, music, and entertainment industry. This naming rights directly tied crypto brands to the center stage of sports and popular culture. At the same time, European football also began to rapidly integrate, with Binance becoming the main sponsor of Lazio's jerseys and promoting narratives such as fan tokens and interactive benefits, merging exchange sponsorship with Web3 product conversion into a single business chain. Entering 2022, this curve continued to rise, reaching its peak at the global sporting event level. Crypto.com not only became a global partner of the F1 Sprint series but also secured an official sponsorship of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, marking the first time a crypto company officially entered the almost universally accessible media system of the world's largest single sporting event. This massive marketing offensive by the crypto industry quickly reached a turning point at the end of 2022. FTX's collapse quietly turned naming rights into a liability. In January 2023, a bankruptcy judge officially terminated the naming agreement between Miami-Dade County and FTX, and the venue subsequently entered a process of de-FTXization and re-sponsoring. This event became a negative example in the history of sports and cultural sponsorship. After 2023, the industry as a whole entered a period of contraction and reassessment. Many collaborations shifted from venue naming rights and official sponsorship of top-tier events back to more quantifiable ROI forms such as jersey sleeve patches, training kits, digital content rights, and fan interaction activities. Sponsors also placed greater emphasis on compliance and sustainable exposure. In the football field, the OKX-Manchester City partnership is a more controllable version of this: from the official training kit collaboration in 2022 to the subsequent expansion to a higher-level sleeve patch collaboration, its path resembled a gradual upgrade of traditional sponsorship rather than a one-step gamble. From a macro perspective, the main theme of this phase is no longer the ubiquitous crypto advertising, but rather how sports and cultural institutions reprice their new revenue, reputation, and compliance risks. In the past two years, this narrative has undergone a more subtle shift. Crypto sponsorships haven't disappeared, but they tend to repackage their relationship with the mainstream using stablecoins, compliant products, and brand credibility. For example, the 2025 partnership between Aston Martin F1 and Coinbase was described as the first publicly announced case of paying sponsorship fees in full with stablecoins. Coinbase's appearance at the Super Bowl in 2026, with its closing slogan "Crypto. For everybody," demonstrates its attempt to pull cryptocurrency from its early niche audience back into the mainstream narrative of "universal participation."

This year's F1 season will kick off in March. Last year, the cryptocurrency industry spent $174 million on F1 sponsorship projects alone. This year, cryptocurrency sponsorship has reached a new high: 9 out of 11 teams are sponsored by companies.

Exposure, Traffic, and Controversy

Among the various advertisements and sponsorships of crypto companies, the exposure and conversion effects brought by medium- and long-term cooperation are difficult to estimate, but in one-off investments like the Super Bowl, the early results are very significant.

In 2022, on Super Bowl Day, Coinbase saw a 309% week-over-week increase in installations, followed by a 286% increase the next day; eToro saw a 132% increase on Super Bowl Day and an 82% increase the next day; and FTX saw a 130% increase on Super Bowl Day and an 81% increase the next day. Coinbase's QR code ads even crashed or experienced access issues due to the surge in user scans. This demonstrates the short-term conversion power of Super Bowl ads, at least in terms of downloads and activations, which is sufficient to create a peak. However, this explosive growth does not automatically translate into long-term retention, asset accumulation, and compliant operation capabilities. In the medium to long term, the hidden costs of sponsorship often materialize during periods of tightened regulation and enforcement. Taking the collaboration between Premier League club Arsenal and Socios's fan token as an example, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled in 2021 on Arsenal's related promotional content, concluding that the advertisements downplayed high-risk decisions in the context of crypto assets and failed to adequately disclose key risk information such as taxation. Ultimately, the ASA ordered the advertisements to be removed from the list of items subject to complaints, and required the club to adjust its page and risk warning presentation. As the world's most popular sport, football has always been a favored traffic source for crypto companies. Compared to crypto giants willing to invest heavily, the companies entering football leagues and clubs are more complex, generating more controversy and negative impacts. In 2024, a book titled *No Questions Asked: How Football Joined the Crypto Con* was published, describing football's embrace of crypto sponsorship as a collective failure driven by greed and wishful thinking, with little due diligence. The result was treating fans as outlets for high-risk, poorly regulated financial products, while clubs, after defaulting, often failed to apologize, explain, or promise to improve. The core of the conflict in sports and the arts lies in the fact that organizations, under financial pressure, introduce high-risk sponsorships, potentially binding their reputation to the credit of their counterparts. Sports sponsorship research categorizes this damage into operational risk and reputational risk: once a sponsor defaults or a major controversy arises, the sponsorship asset transforms from a "credit enhancement tool" into a "liability." Expanding to a sociological perspective, the controversy centers on crypto companies leveraging the emotional communities (sports fans, music lovers, movie buffs) within sports and culture to lower the barrier to entry, packaging highly volatile assets as symbols of identity, interest, and trend, thereby amplifying FOMO and herd mentality. The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), in the Floki Inu London Underground advertising case, explicitly stated that it "exploited the fear of missing out, trivialized investment risks, and was irresponsible towards inexperienced individuals," becoming a typical example of regulatory rhetoric. Collaborations with film festivals, art fairs, and awards also serve a similar function, but this "cultural legitimization" is not equivalent to financial suitability; it's more like a transformation of symbolic capital: replacing risk interpretation with cultural authority, and product understanding with brand association. Regulation and enforcement are gradually being improved. Faced with the expansion and controversy surrounding crypto sponsorship in sports and culture, regulatory agencies are gradually improving their rules. In the UK, financial regulators announced in 2023 that they would implement stricter requirements for crypto asset marketing to UK consumers from October 8th, including a cooling-off period for first-time investors, enhanced risk warnings, and an explicit ban on inappropriate incentives such as referral rewards. The American Securities and Investments Authority (ASA) has, through a series of rulings, implemented standards such as "whether risk presentation is adequate," "whether it exploits inexperience," and "whether it encourages debt-based purchases" down to specific copywriting and advertising scenarios, and in 2026 expanded its review scope to "whether crypto is packaged as a solution to real-world financial problems." In the US, consumer protection agencies updated their "Disclosure Obligations of Influencers and Advertisers" guidelines from an advertising and anti-fraud perspective, and released an updated endorsement guideline in 2023 to address platform-based distribution and influencer marketing; they also revealed the high incidence of crypto fraud through data reports, strengthening public education and platform governance pressure. Futures and derivatives regulators continue to publish digital asset risk education materials to prevent the public from being misled into related fraudulent activities. In the EU, the MiCA framework explicitly requires service providers to communicate with potential holders in a fair, clear, and non-misleading manner in its official summary, along with consumer risk warnings and reminders of authorization/regulatory boundaries. EU regulators have also issued risk warnings for consumers. With the rising influence of financial content on social media, EU securities regulators have also released a fact list for "finfluencers," emphasizing the need for significant disclosure of compensation and vested interests, and prohibiting the use of obscure labeling to downplay advertising. This regulatory framework implies that sponsorship will become more like regular marketing in regulated industries in the future. The effectiveness of these measures is reflected in three points: First, the minimum risk disclosure standards for advertising text are being raised, especially in UK rulings; second, the disclosure obligation for celebrity endorsements is shifting from a "moral expectation" to an enforceable rule; and third, cross-border platform distribution is being incorporated into the regulatory narrative (even if an advertisement is produced overseas, it may still be regulated if it is targeted at domestic consumers). However, regulatory gaps remain equally clear. The ambiguous legal nature of many tokens or experiential benefits means that regulators can only address superficial issues such as misleading information and disclosure requirements. Sponsorship contracts, on the other hand, are transactions between companies and clubs, with the core meaning determined by the parties in the contract. Regulators typically cannot directly establish uniform risk control standards for such commercial transactions, such as "naming rights," and can only intervene from the perspectives of advertising compliance and consumer protection.