Coinbase Super Bowl Ad Results in Outage, Shares Slip 5%

Coinbase spent as much as $14 million in its 30 second Super Bowl ad on Sunday only to see a temporary outage of its platform due to unprecedented heavy traffic of users.

Coinbase’s Chief Product Officer, Surojit Chatterjee revealed that the crypto exchange saw record traffic in its operational history. That caused a brief outage of the platform, but the team was quick enough to adapt the infrastructure and make it ready to handle such a surprising load.

Coinbase was one of the many crypto exchanges that featured ads during the Super Bowl LVI between the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals. Coinbase’s ad stood out as the exchange had a bold approach of showcasing a letter ‘C’ and then a QR code bouncing into the screen in a retro DVD logo style for a minute.

Being scanned, the QR code took potential clients to a landing page with information of the giveaway: the crypto exchange is handing out $15 worth of Bitcoin to new users and $1 million each to three existing users.

The massive ad campaign was maligned by the consecutive outage of the platform. It resulted in a flood of negative reactions and memes on social media and even received the reaction of former NSA analyst and whistleblower , Edward Snowden.

“Coinbase spending $16,000,000 on a Superbowl ad to direct people to their website and $0 to make sure that website doesn't crash 10 seconds after the ad starts is so very internet,” Snowden wrote on Twitter.

Bloody Wall Street

Further, the investors of the publicly-listed exchange did not take the ad campaign the right way. Coinbase’s share price dropped by 5 percent in the after-hours trading before the US stock markets open on Monday. The crypto exchange stock is trading around $195 apiece, as of press time.

Meanwhile, other top crypto exchanges like FTX, Crypto.com and eToro bought Super Bowl ad space to feature their ads.