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

Author: Zen, PANews

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 crazy night four years earlier known as the "Crypto Bowl".

At the time, FTX's logo was prominently displayed above the Miami Heat's arena, and crypto companies were waving huge checks, attempting to buy decades of mainstream trust in just a few days. However, the ensuing collapse, lawsuits, and the farce of renaming the arena turned this "attention experiment" into one of the most expensive jokes in sports history.

On the surface, it's a branding business, but in reality, it's more like a stress test: when sponsorship embeds financial narratives into the daily lives of fans and viewers, trust is amplified. Essentially, it's a long-term experiment on how high-risk financial products can gain attention and legitimacy through highly trusted public institutions.

Sponsorship by crypto companies: Starting from the era of "money-spraying"

In 2021, with the emergence of a phenomenal bull market, cryptocurrency companies that had rapidly amassed wealth began to aggressively penetrate the sports and culture sectors. Cryptocurrency exchanges and blockchain projects started directly attaching their brands to the most expensive and prominent public attention-grabbing channels, such as top leagues, leading stadiums, and global sports broadcasts.

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

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 considered one of 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 crossover effect. This arena, home to the Los Angeles Lakers, a powerhouse team, is also a major landmark for Los Angeles' performance, music, and entertainment industry, and this naming rights directly ties the crypto brand to the heart of sports and popular culture.

During the same period, European football also began to quickly integrate, with Binance becoming the main sponsor of Lazio's jersey and taking the opportunity to promote 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 climb and reached its peak at the global sporting event level. Crypto.com not only became a global partner of the F1 Sprint series, but also secured the official sponsorship of the 2022 Qatar World Cup, marking the first time a crypto company had officially entered the almost universally accessible media system of the world's largest single sporting event.

The crypto industry's massive marketing campaign quickly reached a turning point at the end of 2022. FTX's collapse quietly turned the 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 has become 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 forms with more quantifiable ROI, such as jersey sleeve patches, training apparel, digital content rights, and fan interaction activities. At the same time, sponsors also placed greater emphasis on compliance and sustainable exposure.

In the realm of football, the partnership between OKX and Manchester City represents a more controlled version of this: from the official training kit collaboration in 2022 to the subsequent expansion to a higher-profile armband partnership, its path resembles a gradual upgrade of traditional sponsorship rather than a high-stakes gamble. From a macro perspective, the main theme at this stage is no longer ubiquitous encrypted advertising, but rather how sports and cultural institutions reprice the balance between new revenue and reputation versus compliance risks.

In the past two years, this line of events has undergone a more subtle change. Crypto sponsorship has not disappeared, but there is a greater tendency to repackage its 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 the full sponsorship fee in stablecoins. Coinbase's appearance at the Super Bowl in 2026, with its closing slogan "Crypto. For everybody," demonstrated its attempt to bring cryptocurrency from its early niche audience back into the mainstream narrative of "universal participation."

The Formula 1 season is set to begin in March this year. Last year, the cryptocurrency industry spent $174 million on F1 sponsorships alone. This year, cryptocurrency sponsorships have reached a new high: 9 out of 11 teams are sponsored by various companies.

Exposure, traffic generation, and controversy

While the exposure and conversion rates from medium- to long-term collaborations in various advertisements and sponsorships for crypto companies are difficult to estimate, the early results of a one-off investment like the Super Bowl are quite significant.

In 2022, on Super Bowl Day, Coinbase saw a 309% week-over-week increase in installs, 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 experienced app crashes and access issues due to the surge in user scans. This demonstrates the short-term conversion power of Super Bowl ads, at least enough to create peak downloads and activations.

However, this explosive growth does not automatically translate into long-term retention, asset accumulation, and compliance capabilities. In the medium to long term, the hidden costs of sponsorship often materialize during periods of tightened regulation and enforcement.

For example, in 2021, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled on Arsenal's promotional content, finding that the advertisements downplayed high-risk decisions in the context of crypto assets and failed to adequately disclose key risk information such as tax risks. Ultimately, the ASA required the advertisements to be removed from the list of complaints and that the club should adjust the way the page and risk warnings were presented.

As the world's most popular sport, football has always been a preferred traffic source for crypto companies. Compared to crypto giants that are willing to invest heavily, the companies that flock to football leagues and clubs are more complex and generate more controversy and negative impacts.

In 2024, a book titled "No Questions Asked: How Football Joined the Crypto Con" was published, which described football's embrace of crypto sponsorship as a collective dereliction of duty driven by greed and luck with almost no due diligence. The result was that fans were treated as an outlet for high-risk, low-regulation financial products, and clubs often did not apologize, explain, or promise to improve after the scandal broke.

The core of the conflict in the sports and arts sectors lies in the fact that organizations, under financial pressure, introduce high-risk sponsorships, potentially binding their reputation to the credit of their competitors. 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."

Extending to a sociological perspective, the controversy centers on how crypto companies leverage the emotional communities of sports and culture (fans, music lovers, moviegoers) to lower the barriers to participation, packaging highly volatile assets as identities, interests, and trends, thereby amplifying FOMO and herd diffusion.

In the Floki Inu London Underground advertisement case, the UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) explicitly stated that the advertisement "exploited the fear of missing out, trivialized investment risks, and was irresponsible towards inexperienced individuals," becoming a typical example of regulatory language. Collaborations with film festivals, art fairs, and awards also serve a similar function, but this "cultural legitimization" is not equivalent to financial suitability; it is more like a transformation of symbolic capital: substituting cultural authority for risk interpretation and brand association for product understanding.

Supervision and enforcement are gradually being improved.

In response to the expansion and controversy surrounding crypto sponsorship in the sports and cultural fields, regulatory agencies are gradually supplementing the rules.

In the UK, financial regulators announced in 2023 that they would impose stricter requirements on crypto asset marketing to UK consumers from October 8th, including a cooling-off period for first-time investors, enhanced risk warnings, and a clear ban on inappropriate incentives such as referral rewards.

ASA, through intensive rulings, has put standards such as "whether the risk presentation is sufficient," "whether it takes advantage of inexperience," and "whether it encourages debt purchases" into specific wording and delivery scenarios. In 2026, the scope of review was expanded to "whether encryption is packaged as a solution to real financial problems."

In the United States, 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 used data reports to highlight the prevalence of crypto scams, strengthening public education and platform governance pressures. Futures and derivatives regulators continued to publish educational materials on digital asset risks to prevent the public from falling into related fraud traps.

In the EU, the MiCA framework explicitly requires service providers to communicate with potential holders in a fair, clear, and non-misleading manner, along with consumer risk warnings and reminders of authorization/regulatory boundaries. EU regulators have also issued risk warnings for consumers. With the increasing influence of financial content on social media, EU securities regulators have also released a fact list for "finfluencers," emphasizing the need for prominent disclosure of compensation and vested interests, and prohibiting the use of obscure labeling to downplay advertising.

The aforementioned regulatory framework means that sponsorships will become more like regular marketing in regulated industries in the future. The effectiveness of these measures is reflected in three aspects: First, the minimum risk disclosure standards for advertising texts are being raised, especially in UK adjudication practice; second, the disclosure obligations of celebrity endorsements are shifting from "moral expectations" to enforceable rules; 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 as long as it is targeted at domestic consumers).

However, regulatory gaps remain equally clear. The ambiguous legal status of many tokens or experiential benefits means that regulators can only address superficial issues by focusing on whether there is misleading information and the need for proper disclosure.

Sponsorship contracts are transactions between companies and clubs, and their core elements are determined by the agreements between the two parties within the contract. Regulators typically cannot directly establish uniform risk control standards such as "naming rights" for these commercial transactions; they can only intervene from the perspectives of advertising compliance and consumer protection.