A Super Bowl LVI commercial featured one of the most popular non-fungible token collections on the planet. If you blinked twice, or were looking at a different part of the screen, you may have missed it.
What Happened: The Super Bowl LVI commercial from eToro is making headlines for featuring a Shiba Inu dog. Several different cryptocurrency communities are all claiming the commercial was meant for them.
While Shiba Inu (CRYPTO: SHIB), Floki Inu (CRYPTO: FLOKI) and Dogecoin (CRYPTO: DOGE) fight over which one the dog was symbolizing in the ad, another animal was featured briefly in the commercial.
“We brought a friend to the big game, did you spot him in our commercial?” eToro tweeted while tagging the official Bored Ape Yacht Club Twitter account and using the popular community hashtag of #apefollowape.
Located in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen in a store window was a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT.
The Ape featured is said to be Bored Ape #6189, which features the following traits:
Purple Background: 13%
Tie-Dye Clothes: 1%
Hypnotized Eyes: 2%
Brown Fur: 14%
Horns: 3%
Phoneme Ooo Mouth: 3%
The Ape was purchased on Jan. 6, 2022, for 80 Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH).
eToro CEO and Founder Yoni Assia changed his profile picture to Bored Ape #3874 on Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) in 2021, revealing its purchase.
“I’ve been following the #NFT space, some books/articles even attribute my initial article of #ColoreCoins as invention of NFTs, it’s a fascinating industry,” Assia tweeted.
Ape #3874 was purchased for 52 Ethereum and has since been transferred from the Etoro1 OpenSea account to an account named AdamAssia, which could belong to Yoni’s son of the same name.
Related Link: Super Bowl LVI Becomes Crypto Bowl With Commercials, Ad Campaigns For Big Game
Why It’s Important: Cryptocurrency and NFTs were a major theme at Super Bowl LVI with several companies spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns during and around the big game including the likes of Binance, FTX, Crypto.com and Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ:COIN).
Bored Ape Yacht Club became a big storyline for the Super Bowl with halftime performers Snoop Dogg and Eminem and NFL player Von Miller featured during the game among the many owners of the popular NFT collection.
eToro announced a SPAC merger with Fintech Acquisition Corp V (NASDAQ:FTCV) in 2021 that has been delayed and faced several hurdles to get completed.
At the time of Assia’s first Bored Ape purchase, he announced that eToro was exploring getting into NFTs.
“We @eToro are now exploring the #NFT space, and with retrospect of 10 years in the #crypto space, I have to say that there is logic in the #mostentertainingoutcome concept in the metaverse,” Assia said.
The commercial could be another preview from eToro that it is getting into the NFT space.
While many in the NFT space were expecting more prominent highlights of Bored Apes at the Super Bowl, the commercial from eToro allows the NFT community to say that Bored Apes were featured in a Super Bowl commercial.
Bored Ape Yacht Club has a floor price of 99.99 ETH at the time of writing.
Photo: Benzinga Twitter
