Super Bowl Crypto Ads: Are Big Ads a Market Top Signal?

On the 13th of February, 2022, before kickoff, the boss of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, posted that he was excited to see the crypto bowl. That night in 2022, crypto bought the Super Bowl. FTX ran an advert with the comedian Larry David. Coinbase put a bouncing QR code on screen for a whole minute. crypto.com had LeBron James, and eToro had a spot, too. Then it crashed.

Bitcoin was around $42,000 that Sunday. By November 2022, it was under 16,000. And FTX, the company behind the Larry David advert, had gone bust. So, the crypto bowl came before a 60% crash. That's why a lot of people in crypto talk about the Super Bowl crypto curse.

When crypto firms spend millions on a big ad splash, the theory says the top is in. So, is a big ad a top signal? And how do we make sure we don't buy the top on marketing? If you own XRP, this matters. So, let's test the Super Bowl crypto curse before hype makes you buy the top.

We'll go year by year from 2022 to 2026, with the dates and the prices, and then I'll show you what protects us. There's a link sitting first in the description, and before we get to the 5-minute mark, I'll tell you why it's there. It was put there for anybody who's ever bought something, mostly because everybody else seemed to be buying it. And let's be honest, a lot of us know that feeling. The adverts are everywhere.

A friend at work is suddenly talking about coins, and it feels like the train is leaving without us. That's exactly when we tend to buy without a plan. The idea that big publicity marks a top is much older than crypto. Traders have talked for decades about the magazine cover indicator. When a market makes the front of a big business magazine, the story goes, the easy money is gone.

The famous example runs the other way. In August 1979, Business Week ran a cover called The Death of Equities, and within about 3 years, one of the biggest bull markets in American history had begun. Then there's the Super Bowl indicator. In 1978, a sports writer called Leonard Kopett noticed that the stock market tended to rise in years when a team from one particular league won the game. Nobody serious thinks a football result moves a market.

It's the classic coincidence that looks like a rule. The version crypto people really mean comes from the year 2000. On the 30th of January 2000, more than a dozen dot-com companies paid for Super Bowl ads, including pets.com with its famous sock puppet. Six weeks later, on the 10th of March 2000, the Nasdaq hits its peak, and then it fell for more than 2 years. pets.com shut down in November 2000. So when the crypto bull was followed by a crash, plenty of people saw the dot-com story again.

And here's how CBS News put it 3 days before kickoff.

Well, what usually happens with these Super Bowl commercials, Amaria, is you'll see one or two type of companies come in for like a one-hit thing, and either they're like a completely bust, or they'll do fantastic and you'll see them going on to Super Bowl commercials in year after year after year. We don't really know what's going to happen with the crypto companies this year. The few experts we spoke to said they don't really expect to see this many crypto ads in the Super Bowl next year.

Either they go bust, or they do fantastic. Now hold on to that line, because it turns out to be the fairest summary of the whole theory. As always, this is not financial advice, so please do your own research. Like if you're bullish, let's run it.

Let's run

Hey bull runners, welcome back. So, here's the part where I point you somewhere useful. Nobody can tell us when the next top is coming, me included. But, we can decide in a quiet moment what we do when the hype arrives, rather than deciding in the middle of it. Am I telling you to buy XRP?

Well, no. There may be better opportunities for your situation. But, whatever you hold, it helps to have a plan written down before the next wave of adverts. That's where our Altcoin Pro course comes in. It helps you set how much of your money goes into any one coin, how you'd buy in steps instead of all at once, and what you do if the price ran away from you.

And here's how to get started. Go to the first link in the description and fill in the short form. Then, book your free 15-minute call and one of the team will talk you through your own strategy and your own situation with you. And it doesn't cost anything. If you're watching this on your phone, just tap more under the video and it's the first link you'll see.

Do it now while the adverts are quiet and your head is clear. Then come back because the first test of the curse is the year it all started. Let's start with the case everyone points to and check the dates properly. Bitcoin's peak in that cycle was on the 10th of November 2021 at around $69,000. So, on Super Bowl Sunday, the 13th of February 2022, at around 42,000, it was about 40% below the top.

The famous Matt Damon advert for crypto.com, the one that said fortune favors the brave, came out in late October 2021, a couple of weeks before that peak. But, the Super Bowl ads themselves came about 3 months after it. XRP tells a similar story. It was around 80 cents on Super Bowl Sunday and it finished 2022 at around 34 cents. So, the crypto bull didn't call the top.

The top had come and gone. What it did do was mark the moment the most money and the most confidence were pouring into marketing. And then came November 2022. On the 11th of November, FTX filed for bankruptcy. Within days, the celebrities who'd advertise it were being named in a lawsuit.

A new class action lawsuit is calling out big name celebrities that endorsed FTX. Tom Brady, the Golden State Warriors, Shaquille O'Neal, Larry David, and Sam Bankman-Fried himself are just some of the celebs named in the suit. Now, the class action lawsuit alleges that FTX engaged in a Ponzi scheme and, quote, needed celebrities to continue funneling investors

Those were allegations in a lawsuit, not findings. But, the point for us is the timing. One of the biggest spenders on fame was the one that collapsed. In March 2024, Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud. If the curse was real, you'd expect the opposite to work, too.

No crypto ads should mean a good year. So, what happened when crypto disappeared from the Super Bowl? Well, in 2023, it disappeared completely. And here's CNBC 5 days before the game.

Fox announced yesterday that in-game ads for the Super Bowl have all been sold and there is zero representation in the crypto category. The executive VP of ad sales for Fox Sports said two crypto advertisers had commercials, quote, booked and done and two others were close to finishing the process, but following the FTX collapse, those deals weren't [music] completed.

There wasn't a single crypto advert. On that Sunday, the 12th of February 2023, Bitcoin was around $22,000. By the end of 2023, it was around $42,000. XRP was under 40 cents on the day of the game and after a court ruling in Ripple's case on the 13th of July 2023, it briefly jumped above 90 cents. In 2024, crypto stayed away again.

Fox Business reported that crypto was absent from the Super Bowl ads, even though the first American spot Bitcoin fans had launched a month earlier. On the 11th of February 2024, Bitcoin was around 48,000. On the 14th of March 2024, it hit a new record above 73,000. You might think that looks good for the theory. No ads, price is up.

But, look at 2025. Once more, there were no big crypto ads at the Super Bowl, which was on the 9th of February. Bitcoin was around 96,000 that day, and by the 7th of April 2025, it had dropped to around 75,000, losing more than a fifth of its value. No adverts, and it fell anyway. Then, it turned again.

XRP hits a record high of about $3.65 on the 18th of July 2025. And Bitcoin hit a record of about 126,000 on the 6th of October 2025. Neither of those peaks came with a single crypto Super Bowl ad anywhere near it. Which brings us to the 8th of February 2026, Super Bowl 60. A 30-second slot was reported to cost up to $10 million.

The Super Bowl, we know this is more than a game. For many viewers, it's about the commercials that are costing up to $10 million for 30 seconds. This year, there'll be a face-off between two AI names, OpenAI and Anthropic.

So, the headline battle was between AI companies and crypto. According to Decrypt, crypto's Super Bowl moment shrank to a single Coinbase advert. It turned the screen into karaoke, and Brian Armstrong posted that he loved the idea, comparing it to the QR code ad from 2022. And is the key detail. That ad didn't land near a top at all.

Three days before the game on the 5th of February 2026, Bloomberg reported Bitcoin had dropped below $61,000, wiping out its gains since Trump's election win. The same day, CoinDesk reported XRP had crashed to its lowest since that election, too. By the evening of the Super Bowl, Bitcoin had climbed back above 72,000, and that's according to WatcherGuru. And when I checked on the 15th of October 2026, WatcherGuru had posted that Bitcoin had fallen under $80,000. So, 8 months after crypto's comeback advert, Bitcoin was above where it was on the night of the game, not below it.

So, let's put it all together fairly. So, that's five Super Bowls. There was one big crypto ad splash and a crash after it. There were three years with no ads, which included two strong runs and one sharp fall. And there was one comeback ad that landed after a big drop, not before one.

That's not a curse. With one real example, it's not even a pattern. What the 2022 story does show is there's something more useful. Super Bowl adverts cost millions, and companies tend to splash that kind of money when they're flush with cash and customers are flooding in. So, the ads don't cause a top, and they don't predict it to the day.

They're a symptom of a crowd that's excited, which is often late in the move. The dot-com ads and the crypto bull both came after prices had run hard for exactly that reason. So, here's the honest version of the theory. When the marketing is the loudest in the room, that's not a sell signal. It's a slow down signal.

So, where does that leave those of us who hold XRP? Because XRP has its own hype moments, and they don't need a Super Bowl. A celebrity post, a rumor about a bank, a big headline, and the prices can jump in hours. Back in May 2018, a few months after XRP's first big peak, CNBC asked Brad Garlinghouse why XRP moved so closely with Bitcoin if it was meant to be the useful one. His answer sums up the difference between hype and adoption.

I think you're also right that there is a lot of correlation right now between the entire crypto digital asset market and you're not seeing that differentiation. I think that's just a matter of time as people better understand the different use cases, as people better understand the utility and the problem that's being solved with these different digital assets. There's obviously been a lot of noise, a lot of hype, and I think it's incredibly important that we stay grounded in like what's the real problem? Who's the customer? What's the value being created by solving that problem for those customers?

What's the real problem? Who's the customer and what's the value? That's a better filter than any advert. And look at what the dates tell us about XRP. It's record high, about $3.65 on the 18th of July 2025, came with no Super Bowl ad at all.

And in mid-October 2026, Markets post on X had XRP trading at around a $1.30 to a $1.40, which is more than 60% below that peak. The hype and the fall both happened without any help from a football game. Meanwhile, the slower story is the one that sits in filings. On the 10th of February 2026, 2 days after the game, WatcherGuru reported that Goldman Sachs had disclosed about $153 million of XRP exposure in its holdings. That's not a guarantee of anything, but a filing is something you can check, which an advert never is.

And the community has moved on to a new version of the theory. On Super Bowl Sunday 2026, one widely shared post called it the AI Bowl and warned that anyone who'd seen this movie before knew how it ended. Maybe that's right and maybe it isn't. Either way, it's a guess about the crowd, not a fact about any coin. So, how do we make sure we're not the ones buying because of the adverts?

Well, here's what the evidence points to. First, notice where the urge came from. If you want to buy because of an advert, a celebrity, or a headline, that's the moment you want to slow down. Wait a few days and see whether you want it once the noise has passed. Second, write your plan before the hype arrives.

Decide how much of your money any one coin is allowed to be and stick to it. If the price is flying, that number doesn't change. Third, buy in steps. Splitting a purchase across weeks or months means no single hype day decides your average price. And fourth, check adoption somewhere an advertiser can't reach.

Look at the filings, the real usage figures, and what the company itself has actually signed and published. If all you can find is marketing, that tells you something, too. None of that needs you to predict the top. It just stops a 30-second advert making a big decision for you. So, here's my question for you.

What actually made you buy your first coin? Was it an advert, a friend, a headline, or your own research? And tell me honestly in the comments. And if you like seeing a popular theory tested properly against the dates, subscribe because there are plenty more of these to come. Crypto carries risk, and past results are no guarantee of future ones.

This is education, not financial advice. Thanks for watching, guys. Keep your head stacked with purpose, and I'll keep you posted.

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