Coinbase Forced Into Outage Following Super Bowl Ad After More Traffic 'Than Ever Encountered'

Coinbase had to "throttle traffic for a few minutes" after its advertising debut in Super Bowl LVI. Read the full article by Jaime Crawley

We all knew last nights Super Bowl was going to be filled with a bunch of new crypto commercials as companies are targeting sports brands for more exposure. All the popular players such as Coinbase, Crypto.com, and FTX made their plays as expected. The battle for name recognition is starting to get even more heated now that all of these exchanges have large amounts of money to spend.

One of the cooler commercials of the night was the Coinbase QR code commercial that gave scanners the opportunity to get free BTC. Scanners were invited to sign up and receive $15 in BTC and for people that already had an account, they were able to enter a drawing for additional BTC as well. In typical Coinbase fashion shortly after the commercial ended the exchange crashed from the server getting flooded with people. Coinbase used to be notorious for crashing whenever there was a major market movement which hurt a lot of people who were not able to get in or out of trades at that moment.

The Super Bowl usually has around 100 million viewers every year and this one was no different. With all these viewers the price of getting air time is also expensive at $6.5 million for a 30-second ad. Coinbases ad ran for 60 seconds and only showed the QR code bouncing around the screen like an old screen saver. It was actually a very nostalgic commercial in a way if you are old enough to remember those.

All in all the ads were successful and even featured some legendary names and even caused "more traffic than ... ever encountered," Coinbase Chief Product Officer Surojit Chatterjee said in a tweet. FTX had an appearance from Larry David and Crypto.com, fresh off their deal with the Lakers home arena, starred LeBron James talking to a younger version of himself. While the Super Bowl ads do not get as much attention from viewers as we would think, this was still a massive way of letting the country know “we are here.”