Lodge Letters #31: Super Bowl Edition
The NFL Super Bowl offered a star-studded glimpse into crypto’s bid for mass market adoption. Plus: ElkNet surpasses 30k users.
Greeting Elks,
Quite a time to be alive, init? Government reports of rising inflation amid geopolitical tensions on the Crimean border put global financial markets on their heels, triggering a tentative pullback in crypto markets along with other so-called “risk” assets. The collective wisdom seems to be: there is a lot of uncertainty within global markets right now, which may point to greater downside risk for crypto assets…or not. It’s hard to say.
That’s the thing about risk: it involves assigning probabilities to outcomes that are unknown. In some cases — like spinning a roulette wheel or, say, smoking cigarettes — risk falls within fairly knowable statistical parameters. In other scenarios, however, such as the likelihood of a world war, assigning percentages to risk is virtually impossible (and even if it were, the market impacts would remain unclear).
While it’s good to consider personal risk, it’s often ill-advised to make financial decisions based on current events, for the very reason that they tend to be highly unpredictable. As we all know, news cycles change very rapidly, and their correlation to financial markets is typically fairly weak.
Take last night’s NFL Super Bowl–that spectacle of celebrity and global commerce disguised as an American sporting championship. In terms of sheer visibility, this will surely be remembered as a moment when crypto became mainstream.
The evening featured several celebrity-infused ad buys from several major exchange platforms. Crypto.com called on LeBron James to conjure some future nostalgia. FTX pulled off a funnier, lengthier version of the same conceit with a time-traveling Larry David. eToro imagined crypto investors as a flock of European starlings engaged in urban hip murmurations. Most creatively, perhaps, Coinbase smartly adapted the aesthetics of the smartphone era onto the antiquated television platform, offering up a floating QR code as a screensaver for 30 seconds.
The longstanding Super Bowl rivalry between Miller and Budweiser beer companies, meanwhile, took to the realm of the metaverse, with Miller Lite opening a bar in Decentraland, while Budweiser hitched it’s saddle to an NFT-backed DAO.
What will all these advertising pushes amount to? Again, it’s hard to say. Crypto markets were fairly unmoved during the festivities (this is perhaps better than 2021, which saw a decent selloff during the Super Bowl). Advertising does not always translate into adoption; sometimes it can be a sign that organic growth has slowed. Still, Coinbase shot up nearly 200 spots to #2 on the App Store. Couldn’t hurt.
Whatever the general impact, however, there was one thought that stuck out to my mind: with the exception of the online beer ads, all of these are focused on large, centralized exchanges and trading platforms. DeFi thus remains a mostly foreign realm in this terrain. So, while there are signs that crypto has become a household concept, the spaces that we all inhabit as a community still have plenty of room to run.
Elk quietly hit some major milestones this week. ElkNet passed 30,000 users and an astounding 60 million $ELK have been transferred across chains (meaning that the average user has sent a total of 2,000 ELK over ElkNet).
Keep an eye on Twitter and our social channels this week for some new partner events and announcements. Have a good week!
