FTX’s Steph Curry Ad Is the First Honest Celebrity Crypto Commercial

There is a commercial Cryptocurrency-trading platform for FTX which is being promoted throughout the NBA playoffs. In it, superstar Steve Curry goes through a silly version of his day – eating cereals, making pasta, carving an ice sculpture – where narrator Shakil O’Neill insists Curry knows everything he needs to know about crypto. An excited curry repeatedly denies it. “I’m not an expert এবং and I don’t have to,” Curry finally says, holding the FTX app on his phone and holding the camera. “With FTX, I have everything I need to buy, sell and trade crypto securely.”

Give Curry and FTX points for honesty. The new commercial says what should have been clear to anyone paying attention: Countless celebrities who have jumped on the bandwagon of crypto (and NFT) certainly know very little about what they are selling. It transcends the innate transactional nature of corporate sponsorship. Everyone knows athletes advertise because they get paid, because they don’t actually use the product. (Hulu has a series of really ridiculous ads that have turned this fact off.) I suspect Curry, who was paid $ 45 million to play basketball this past season, ate a lot of subway sandwiches. Yet I believe he can choose the difference between steak and cheese and the All-American club that he recently shill a trade. On the other hand, it would be amazing if Curry বা or Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, Charlie D’Amelio, Snoop Dogg, or Matt Damon ব্যাখ্যা could explain what anyone is buying when they invest in crypto.

Alas, the integrity of curry advertising has been offset by its denunciation, which sets a new standard for an industry that has a lot left to do. Crypto advertising blitz started earnestly late last year, rising with the price of digital assets. The Super Bowl has infamously featured a number of big-budget ads from the industry. Most notable was an FTX ad in which comedian Larry David dismissed Crypto as a passing fad, saying, “Don’t be like Larry.” As many observers have noted, these ads clearly omit something about the core competencies of crypto. Rather, they tried to evoke the feeling of FOMO, or the fear of being lost, with the suggestion that viewers who would not buy now would regret it like Larry did.

These FOMO ads at least expose the possibility that a consumer will learn about it before investing in crypto. Curry commercial dispenses with this pretense. Simply put, there is a difference between not being an expert on something and being ignorant about it. But the ad clearly targets people who are reluctant to trade crypto because they do not understand it. Their message: Don’t worry, Steff doesn’t either! And perhaps, by extension, no one! If everyone else works with ignorance, then maybe you are not in big trouble. So go ahead, trade away. FTX did not respond to a request for comment.

Legendary investor Warren Buffett advised, “Never invest in a business you don’t understand.” (It’s not clear if he ever used these exact words, but the quote took his own life.) A traditional investment is a bet that the business you’re investing in will become more valuable over time. As the fundamentals improve, and the business grows and becomes more profitable, more people will be willing to pay more for a portion of it by increasing the value of your shares. If you do not understand how the business makes money, then you have no basis to make a reasonable judgment about how its stock will work. Yet as Curry Commercial makes clear, there is a way to avoid that middle ground in the crypto market. Forget the basics: For the average investor, the decision to buy a particular cryptocurrency seems like a pure bet that someone else may want to buy it for more money in the future. This is also the principle behind the meme stock phenomenon, which is philosophically closer to the crypto world than traditional stock-market investing.

There is a name for investment whose value depends entirely on finding future buyers who are willing to pay more than what you have put in: the register scheme. Critics have labeled crypto with that label as long as crypto was around. Recently, the criticism has received support from an improbable source. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and CEO of FTX, appeared last week Lots of weirdness During the podcast discussion, Bloomberg financial columnist Matt Levin asked Bankman-Fried to explain “yield farming”, a form of crypto investment where people can buy into a “liquidity pool” that can offer high-interest rates but can also do so. Go south quickly.