January was a much simpler time.
It was a time when an Oscar-winning movie star like Matt Damon could star in an expensive Crypto.com ad (CRCW) and the internet, in a rare moment of unity, would decide it was good and great.
Except… (check notes) which did not turn out to be the case.
Damon’s commercial for Crypto.com, which premiered in early January in theaters and was later played during the Super Bowl, was bluntly mocked on Twitter. (TWTR) – Get a report from Twitter Inc. nese entre.
Half a year later, the value of cryptocurrency and related ephemeral items, such as NFTs, plummeted from what now looks like a $ 3 trillion peak in November. The cryptocurrency market, in total, has lost more than $ 2 trillion as of this week, and there is no sign that the bleeding will stop soon.
The Internet has a long memory for those it deems worthy of contempt, and it now appears that Damon’s cryptographic announcement has inspired a new round of teasing. But the reasons for this new round of roasting are a little more complex than the simple schadenfreude.
Damon appeared in an ad that was part of a $ 100 million ad campaign for the Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange app and platform. For its problems, Crypto.com has made a $ 1 million investment in the nonprofit organization Damon Water.org, which works to provide access to safe drinking water, according to Bloomberg. He is also an investor in Crypto.com.
At the same time as the campaign, Crypto.com also paid $ 700 million to rename the Los Angeles Staples Center as Crypto.com Arena. In retrospect, some analysts believe it probably represented a warning sign, as such ultra-expensive naming rights maneuvers have historically preceded an accident, as was the case just before the dot bubble burst and when Enron broke. .
Damon has been the internet kid for quite some time. From making ill-received comments about the diversity of aspiring directors in the 2015 reboot of his “Project Greenlight” program, to admitting that he didn’t stop referring to gay men as “the f-word” until his daughter said so. He was dangerous a few years ago, often portrayed as an avatar of a well-intentioned but alien white privilege.
But even though Damon’s disdain fueled the mockery, the ads were largely roasted at the time due to a growing backlash against all things cryptographic.
Proponents of cryptocurrency have long argued that it was the future of money and an exciting investment in a stock market that felt firm.
But critics have insisted that cryptocurrencies are not only bad for the environment due to the large amount of energy needed to power them, but that the entire industry had no real value beyond hype, speculation and marketing.
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Let’s just say detractors haven’t softened their sentiment in the months since Damon’s place fell.
Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather also take heat
Cryptocurrencies are often ridiculed as toys for the rich, so when the news comes that the value of bitcoin has dropped by 60%, there are large strips of Twitter reacting with resentful joy.
But here’s what’s often overlooked. Lots of normal, hardworking people without a great fortune at their disposal also they have invested in cryptocurrencies, hoping to pay off their debts, earn enough to buy a home, or otherwise secure a security mattress for the future.
Twitter is now full of people telling stories about their hopes and frustrated fears that the last chance they had to pay off their college debts was gone.
So Twitter’s renewed vitriol serves as a way to unwind in an industry that has taken advantage of desperate people who feel they’ve gotten the short cut of the economic stick and celebrities who often don’t understand the investments they’re endorsing.
Damon isn’t the only celebrity to roam online for helping sell cryptocurrencies to people who ended up losing their shirts.
Boxing champion Floyd Mayweather and socialite Kim Kardashian are facing class action lawsuits for allegedly misleading investors and illegally raising the price of the EthereumMax cryptographic token. The lawsuit was filed Jan. 7 in Los Angeles federal court, and is still pending.
“The company’s executives, collaborating with several famous promoters … have made false or misleading statements about EthereumMax through social media ads and other promotional activities,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit points to a June 2021 Instagram post by Kardashian. “Are you into cryptography?” she wrote in the post, followed by the disclaimer “this is not financial advice,” but that she wanted to share “what my friends just told me” about EthereumMax tokens. Mayweather wore a boxing trunk that endorsed EthereumMax during a highly publicized match against Logan Paul.
Actor Ben McKenzie, best known to old millennials for playing Ryan Atwood in “The OC” now has a margin as an author and critic leading celebrities to back up products without understanding their volatile nature, most notably NFTs. even asking Reese Witherspoon to stop advertising Crypto.
As if to prove McKenzie’s point, the very obviously forced and unbridled conversation of socialite Paris Hilton with Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show” earlier this year is being seen as the peak moment of the Bored Ape Yacht Club trend and the moment in that the public began to turn against the NFTs.
At some point, the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection would regularly change for millions of investors. Since then, the price has dropped rapidly and now Bored Ape NFTs are trading at less than $ 100,000.
Many of these big names and many others, including Tom Brady and Ashton Kutcher, can now regret being associated with a trend that, at best, now seems old-fashioned and absurd. But Twitter isn’t going to let any of them forget.