“History is filled with almosts — with those who almost adventured, who almost achieved,” a black-clad Matt Damon tells the camera as he saunters through a virtual “museum of bravery” displaying an array of milestones in human achievement. “Then, there are others — the ones who embrace the moment and commit,” he continues as he walks past a mountaineer. The video clip ends with Damon telling us: “Fortune favours the brave.”
This could be a promotional video for all kinds of things — a new movie trailer from the Bourne franchise the actor stars in; an ad for an outdoor clothing brand with a lot of spare cash on its hands; even a recruitment campaign for the armed services or some other pursuit requiring a level of courage. But it’s none of those things. After Damon’s earnest delivery of his final line, it is finally revealed what he’s selling: crypto.com.
The ad for the crypto and NFT platform, which first aired in October but has gone viral in recent days after being shown during an NFL game on Sunday, is not going down well. The internet verdict seems to be pretty unanimous: the advert is “cringeworthy”; “pretty cringe”; “cringe-inducing” — you get the idea.
And rightly so. Equating some of the greatest human accomplishments in history with buying strings of digital 1s and 0s that represent crypto tokens or NFTs of bored apes is ludicrous, as is the idea that this should be considered brave (foolhardy is something quite different). But the ad is more than just cringeworthy — there is something grotesque about seeing a man whose net worth was recently valued at $170m shilling for a platform that is already making so much money that it can afford to spend $700m rebranding Los Angeles’ Staples Center as the Crypto.com Arena.
One should always be wary of “calling the top” in any market — most of all crypto. There is no set of fundamental factors one can use to gauge whether prices are too high or low; it’s a market whose main driver seems to be whatever Elon Musk has most recently decided to tweet; one of whose top constituents is based on a joke dog meme. But the backlash the advert has provoked feels like a symptom of a market that has lost some of its fizz. Bitcoin is trading around the $46,000 mark, having lost a third of its value since hitting a record high in November; dogecoin has shed almost four-fifths of its value since last May.
The unenthusiastic reaction to the ad suggests the mood has changed from the exuberance of 2021, when the “LOL” factor seemed to become a genuine market driver. There also seems to be a growing recognition that the crypto market is similar to a Ponzi or pyramid scheme. So widely has this idea now spread that crypto types have even begun defending the idea of these schemes. “Join a pyramid. It’s not a bubble unless it bursts,” one crypto blogger wrote last month in a post named “In praise of Ponzis”.
Crypto.com declined to tell the Financial Times how much Damon had been paid for his appearance but the company reportedly spent more than $100m on the ‘Fortune favours the brave’ campaign — the entire budget for Damon’s last feature film, box office flop The Last Duel. It’s probably safe to assume, therefore, that this was a pretty decent payday for the actor — presumably why Damon, who has spoken out on climate change and its impact on water scarcity, chose to overlook the huge carbon footprint of bitcoin and other crypto tokens and NFTs.
It’s all a bit sickening. Back in 2010, Damon was the narrator for a film on the financial crisis, Inside Job. He closes it with the following on financiers: “They will spend billions fighting reform. It won’t be easy. But some things are worth fighting for.” With crypto companies spending increasing amounts of money on lobbying, these words seem pertinent now.
Damon is not, by any means, the first celebrity to flog crypto to the masses. Kim Kardashian was criticised last year after promoting ethereum Max and everyone from Lindsay Lohan to Melania Trump has been flogging NFTs. But the truth is we all expected better from him. The fact that even a man known for his philanthropy and keeping a low profile appears susceptible to the lure of crypto makes the whole thing seem more sinister.
