The 2023 Super Bowl will not have crypto ads after FTX and others backed out despite buying spots early; crypto companies had around five spots in 2022's game
John Ourand / Sports Business Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
The reversal is stark: a year ago FTX and Crypto.com were running Super Bowl spots even as tokens fell, part of more than $112.9M in crypto TV advertising since 2020 (five crypto spots aired in last year's game). By July 2022, top US crypto advertisers' digital and linear TV spending had already plummeted with the market decline, so the pullback predates FTX's November collapse.
What changed now is that companies which bought 2023 inventory early walked away from it entirely — leaving the biggest US advertising stage with zero crypto presence — and this follows Crypto.com's World Cup spend being overshadowed by FTX's failure and the broader sports-industry scramble to unwind deals that had been displacing gambling sponsors.
First-order effects
- FTX and the other early buyers forfeit paid-for Super Bowl spots, converting committed marketing budgets into sunk costs at the exact moment customer acquisition matters most.
- CBS and other rights holders lose roughly the five-spot category that anchored 2022 demand, forcing them to backfill premium inventory on short notice.
Second-order effects
- Sports properties that signed lucrative crypto sponsorships — some as replacements for banned gambling partners — face pressure to re-sell or discount those categories, per the FT's reporting on the industry-wide rethink.
- Surviving exchanges like Crypto.com must decide whether visibility still buys trust; its sponsorship-heavy strategy has already produced one overshadowed flagship activation, and rivals that sat out the ad arms race gain relative credibility.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, sports marketing becomes a reputational-risk screen rather than pure reach-buying: leagues and broadcasters will weigh sponsor solvency alongside price, and categories tied to speculative finance may face the same scrutiny gambling partners did.
- The 2025 CFTC review of Crypto.com's Super Bowl-related derivatives trading suggests the next crypto-sports collision arrives through regulators rather than ad buyers, keeping the category on broadcast schedules only under compliance terms.
The trend: Crypto's two-year blitz from $112.9M of TV spend to zero Super Bowl ads marks the end of exchanges buying mainstream legitimacy through sports marketing, with regulatory scrutiny replacing celebrity commercials as the category's public interface.