Over the weekend, I was driving on the highway when I came across an odd vehicle on the back of a tow truck.
I did a double-take.
And I had to snap a picture of it...
Not sure if you can make it out, but that's an armored truck with Coinbase branding.
On the back, it says, "It's time to update the system."
An armored truck filled with crypto?!
What the heck is going on?
Well, as it turns out, Coinbase just launched a national campaign last month promoting cryptocurrency and its supposed benefits to the economy.
According to a blog post on the company's website, the campaign is called "Crypto: Moving America Forward."
Coinbase is touting it as a "national campaign aimed at highlighting the importance of cryptocurrency as a technology that will modernize the global financial system."
The campaign comprises a TV ad series airing on popular Sunday shows, an educational program about the history of money, billboards, the aforementioned armored truck, and in-app engagement all culminating in a June 22 "State of Crypto Summit" in New York and a July 19 "Stand for Crypto" gathering in Washington, D.C.
Global fintech website Pymnts reported, "The launch of this campaign comes at a time when the dynamics between Coinbase and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have curdled substantially, with the two duking it out in court over establishing regulatory clarity for the digital asset sector regarding what constitutes operational compliance."
What it all comes back to is the No. 1 problem plaguing crypto: No one actually knows what it is. Despite all the supposed experts, no one can agree on what crypto will ultimately be used for. That's why we need a grand explanation from someone who's made billions off it.
Coinbase Co-Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong lays out the case for crypto in a two-minute elevator pitch in the first ad, and as you'll see, he makes it sound more like a pyramid scheme than ever. All the red flags are cropping up.
I want to break this down section by section so you can see that 14 years after crypto was invented, the people who happened to make millions off it are still using the same old jargon. Nothing's changed.
He opens by saying, "The naive view of crypto is that this is some speculative asset that people are trading and they're going to lose their shirts. That's missing the forest through the trees. It's early days. Yes, some people are trading it as an asset class, but they're also starting to use it in many novel ways... This feels like the early days when I first started using the internet."