It’s one thing to buy the merchandise for your favorite band or movie or game. It’s another thing to wear a tie flooded with bitcoin tokens.
While there has been plenty of coverage for the celebrities who have sunk low enough to become the face of a wide range of crypto projects, some noteworthy brands have also tried to cash in as well. GameStop unleashed its own NFT store, one that’s already doing better than some established trading platforms like Coinbase. But there are even stranger crypto-associations that test the limits of what can and what should exist. What does soap and crypto have to do with each other? How about Laffy Taffy? Can Twinkies be minted onto the blockchain? Can the very concept of a soulless void be made into an NFT? Are we all just fish swimming in a big pond and hooked up to a computer simulation of human existence?
Of course, the ridiculous nature of some of these promotions from brands so wholly unaffiliated with crypto is in itself a means for brand recognition. Though the fact that these companies are willing to tie themselves to a system that has been enmeshed in wide-scale fraud and scams does put an extra bit of onus on these brands. What if a crypto-themed Twinkie does actually get a young person to invest in a crypto scheme that ends up arug pull?
And even when crypto’s price has declined and the value of major NFT trades are still below their height in 2021, the fact that so many companies are still willing to promote crypto shows there’s still enough sense of trying to milk the cash cow of every penny they can before something finally goes bust. Just looking at the past few months, here are some of the absolute worst crypto promotions we’ve come across.
