This year there will be more to the Super Bowl than touchdowns and field goals.
While the Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals are battling on the gridiron, analysts will be watching bitcoin to see if the world's largest cryptocurrency by market cap reaches $50,000.
About 100 million people are expected to watch this year's event, which has been dubbed "The Crypto Bowl" due to the number of cryptocurrency companies advertising during the game.
Hype Driving Volume and Price Action
Coinbase Global (COIN) , FTX and Crypto.com are among those slated to run ads. BitBuy, a Canadian crypto exchange, will reportedly run one during the Canadian broadcast of the game.
In addition, Canadian rapper Drake said he placed a total of around $1.26 million worth of BTC in bets on Sunday’s match, including over $470,000 on Rams winning the Super Bowl and about $790,000 on the team’s wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr.
But will that all attention and all that hype be enough to get bitcoin into the end zone?
"Hype certainly is a driver of volume and price action," said Keegan Francis, bitcoin and crypto specialist, Finder. "So it’s not unreasonable to think that with all the cryptocurrency advertisements happening on the Super Bowl, it will drive people to go and purchase cryptocurrency. Whether or not they will purchase bitcoin is another question."
Francis said the answer depends on the type of advertisements and "whether or not bitcoin is mentioned in a big way."
"Regardless, when people are exposed to other cryptocurrencies, they are inevitably exposed to bitcoin as well," he said, "$50k is just 10% away from bitcoin’s recent price high of $45.5k. A 10% jump is not difficult for bitcoin to attain if there is enough volume and attention placed on it."
Bitcoin was down 5.1% to $42,749 on Friday afternoon and John Kicklighter, chief strategist at DailyFX, said that in the past month, the average daily range was only 5.5%.
'An Exceptional Event'
"It is tempting to say that the Super bowl is an exceptional event with an equally exceptional opportunity to generate price action," he noted. "That said, history does not support the expectation that weekend follow-through is a high probability. That said, thin liquidity over the weekend and an expectation of a number of crypto-related commercials could very well spur the atypical. I am ultimately a probabilities guy, however."
Alexander Mamasidikov, the co-founder of MinePlex, said the crypto companies "are not sparing expense to woo fans."
"While bitcoin is the flagship asset in the cryptocurrency industry, the ads are notably not designed to promote BTC, the products and services being offered by these firms extend far more than just buying bitcoin alone," he said. "As a result, the ads are not likely to fuel the growth of bitcoin this weekend or any other weekend for that matter."
Anthony Portno, founder of Traders of Crypto, said that "if rumors prove true the story for this Super bowl may not be Bitcoin."
"There is a strong chance the popular NFT project Bored Ape Yacht club will feature in the halftime show with several of the performers having recently purchased Apes," he said. "This may also coincide with the launch of the highly anticipated $APE coin and ape characters featuring in adverts."
The Bored Ape Yacht Club is an NFT collection of over 10,000 online images of monkeys striking funny poses. It has become a hot commodity both for collectors and investors and has attracted many celebrities. Two recently sold for over $1 million.
'Some Sort of Impact'
“As for Bitcoin, I think there will almost certainly be some sort of impact from the mention in the Super bowl," Portno said, "whether it could be $50k by Sunday night is hard to say, as the impact may be a little bit delayed. We will see a true reflection of its effect mid-end of the week.”
Alex Lemberg, CEO of Nimbus Platform said "picking individual events as a definitive driver to the growth of Bitcoin and the space overall is a bit too narrow sighted."
"What we should recognize is that the blockchain space and its participant organizations are going to be considerably more in control of messaging and PR than in the past few years," he said. "Events like the Super bowl, F1, World Cup and a slew of others will be great opportunities to bring awareness and adoption. That said though, we will begin seeing marketing and PR in everyday life begin to grow exponentially."
Individual events will create spikes, Lemberg added, but leveraging all forms of traditional marketing will sustain adoption and growth.
"Ultimately it will be the influx of institutional, sovereign and high net worth capital that will drive the price of bitcoin and other blue chip currencies much higher this year," he said.
