Cryptocurrency trading company Coinbase is attempting to reassure its customers that its platform is stable following a Super Bowl ad featuring a bouncing QR code linking to a signup page for new accounts which promptly crashed the entire website. Coinbase claims the massive response led it to “temporarily throttling our systems.”
Vice News reports that Coinbase, the popular cryptocurrency wallet and trading platform, recently ran an ad during the Super Bowl. The ad, named WAGMI (“We’re All Going to Make It”) contained a scannable QR code that bounced around the screen. Scanning the QR code brought users to a page where Coinbase offered $15 in Bitcoin for signing up and a chance to enter a contest.
The webpage crashed immediately due to the increased traffic from the ad. Of course, people immediately began to point out that Coinbase paid millions of dollars to run an ad during the Super Bowl for a website that couldn’t handle the sudden increase in users.
Edward Snowden tweeted: “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.”
However, Coinbase considers the entire effort a great success. In a recent blog post, Coinbase Chief Marketing Officer Kate Rouch revealed that the company saw “20M+ hits on our landing page in one minute” which “led to us temporarily throttling our systems.”
Coinbase executive Brian Armstrong was also quick to tweet about the ad:
The ad campaign is part of a larger attempt by Coinbase to attract new users to its platform by offering “over $100M of similar incentives.” Coinbase also made a point to state that Cryptocurrency is not in any way similar to the dotcom bubble.
In the blog post, Rouch stated: “There have been a lot of comparisons to the dot.com era and speculation that many of the crypto companies advertising in this year’s Super Bowl will inevitably fail. We don’t think about it that way and judging from the early response we’ve seen, Super Bowl viewers don’t either.”
Rouch claimed that the huge number of crypto Super Bowl ads was “yet another signal that crypto is bursting into the mainstream, and at the center of the cultural zeitgeist.”
Read more at Vice News here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com