Crypto.com paid Matt Damon to say 'Fortune Favors the Bold' — right before crypto crashed

Crypto.com went on an unprecedented marketing spending spree in 2021. The company bought the naming rights to Los Angeles' Staples Center in a 20-year, $700 million deal — the largest arena naming rights agreement in history. It signed Matt Damon as brand ambassador in October 2021 with the tagline 'Fortune Favors the Bold,' a campaign that ran across Super Bowl ads, television, and billboards worldwide. The company also spent $100 million on Formula One sponsorship and became an official FIFA World Cup 2022 sponsor.

The strategy worked for growth: Crypto.com went from 10 million users in February 2021 to 50 million by May 2022 and 80 million by June 2023. But the timing could not have been worse. The crypto market peaked in November 2021, then began a crash that erased over $2 trillion in value by late 2022. FTX collapsed in November 2022, triggering a crisis of confidence across the entire crypto industry. The Cronos token (CRO) lost about $1 billion in value in a single week.

Crypto.com was forced into drastic cuts. The company laid off 5% of staff in June 2022, followed by another 30-40% wave by October — over 2,000 employees in total. The aggressive marketing budget was slashed. The Matt Damon ads that had played relentlessly during the boom became a symbol of the industry's excess, mocked online as the market imploded around an ad promising to reward boldness.

The company survived, unlike FTX, but the damage was severe. The 'Fortune Favors the Bold' campaign became a cautionary meme — a reminder that timing is everything in marketing, and that a message of risk-taking sounds very different when the risk has already materialized. By July 2026, Crypto.com had recovered to a reported $20 billion valuation, but the marketing blitz and its aftermath remain a textbook case of advertising at the wrong moment.