Matt Damon is returning to the crypto promotional circuit, although the sales pitch now comes wrapped in the considerably friendlier packaging of clean water and charitable giving. According to Bloomberg, the actor and Water.org co-founder will appear at Ripple’s flagship conference in October, months after the company became a payments partner for his nonprofit.
Damon’s last major crypto campaign is difficult to forget. Crypto.com released its “Fortune Favors the Brave” commercial in October 2021, shortly before the speculative market reached its peak. Directed by Wally Pfister, the cinematographer behind several Christopher Nolan films, the ad placed Damon inside a futuristic gallery filled with tributes to explorers, astronauts, inventors, and other historical risk-takers.
Damon described the people who nearly accomplished something extraordinary but backed away at the decisive moment. He then walked past images of figures including the Wright brothers and climbers attempting to reach the summit of Mount Everest before delivering the slogan: “Fortune favors the brave.” The message was not particularly subtle. Opening a Crypto.com account was presented as the modern equivalent of venturing into space or crossing an unexplored ocean.
The commercial was already several months old when Super Bowl LVI aired in February 2022. Crypto.com’s new game-day advertisement actually featured a digitally de-aged LeBron James talking to his teenage self, but Damon’s campaign remained closely associated with what eventually became known as the “Crypto Bowl” in media reports due to the large number of crypto industry ads that aired during the game.
Fellow crypto exchange FTX, which would later file for bankruptcy due to Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraudulent use of customer funds for other purposes (he’s now seeking a pardon from Trump), used Larry David’s first commercial appearance to depict him rejecting important inventions throughout history before dismissing the exchange. Coinbase spent its minute of airtime displaying a colorful QR code bouncing around the screen like an old DVD screensaver. These campaigns marked the moment crypto companies spent heavily to reach ordinary households just as the market was approaching a brutal reversal.
Damon became one of the most visible targets of the backlash. Critics accused him of lending credibility to a speculative industry and pressuring inexperienced viewers to take financial risks. The commercial was widely criticized online as an advertisement for a pyramid scheme or Ponzi scheme, even though those terms carry specific legal meanings that have not been established against Crypto.com itself. In the New York Times Magazine, Jody Rosen went as far as to write, “I could not shake the feeling that culture has taken a sinister turn,” after viewing the ad multiple times during various sporting events.
The ridicule eventually reached South Park. In the 2022 Paramount+ special The Streaming Wars Part II, the show mocked Damon and other celebrities who promoted crypto. Its version of Damon repeated the “fortune favors the brave” line before participating in an extended joke about drinking urine.
Damon later said there was another reason he accepted the job. During a March 2023 interview with the Associated Press, he explained that Water.org had suffered a difficult financial year and that he donated his entire paycheck for participating in the ad to the nonprofit. He added that Crypto.com learned about the decision and independently donated another $1 million. Damon said he remained grateful for what the company had done for the organization.
When Crypto Promotions Come Wrapped in Charity
Water.org, which Damon co-founded with engineer Gary White, works to expand access to safe drinking water and sanitation. While that work is undoubtedly admirable and valuable, it also does not erase the effect of placing Damon’s reputation behind a risky financial product at almost exactly the wrong moment. Notably, Crypto.com’s own proprietary CRO token was trading around $0.20 when the commercial featuring Damon debuted on October 28, 2021. It subsequently climbed above $0.89 before collapsing. CRO is now worth about $0.056, leaving it roughly 72% below its price when the Damon campaign began and more than 93% below its record high.
the CRO token always seemed like a ponzi to me due to the high rewards on their cards combined with the requirement to stake CRO
— Kyle Torpey (@kyletorpey) May 4, 2022
Crypto.com also previously encouraged customers to buy and lock up CRO to obtain payment-card rewards, higher yields, and other benefits on the platform. Calling the arrangement a proven Ponzi scheme would go beyond the available legal record, but the dependence on new, retail-focused demand to sustain rewards produced dynamics that could reasonably be described as Ponzi-like. Using a trusted celebrity or charitable cause to lower an audience’s skepticism can employ tactics similar to those found in affinity fraud, where an investment promoter borrows trust from a respected person or institution. A donation may benefit its recipients while simultaneously providing a company with goodwill, access, and legitimacy. The charitable purpose does not automatically validate the product being marketed alongside it.
Even Crypto People Don’t Like Ripple
Damon and Water.org are now lending their credibility to Ripple. The SEC previously sued Ripple in December 2020, alleging that the company and two executives raised more than $1.3 billion through unregistered XRP offerings. A federal judge later ruled that Ripple’s institutional sales violated securities law, while certain automated sales on public exchanges did not. The case ended in August 2025 with a $125 million penalty imposed a year earlier and an injunction covering future institutional sales.
Ripple had also donated approximately $4.9 million (in XRP of course) to Donald Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee, according to Fortune, making it the committee’s second-largest corporate donor. The timing attracted obvious scrutiny, particularly as the administration’s SEC retreated from several crypto cases. There is no public evidence proving a quid pro quo, but the overlapping donations, policy changes, and settlement negotiations are relevant context.
Damon is scheduled to appear as a keynote speaker at Ripple Swell, which will take place in New York City from October 27 through October 29. His appearance follows Ripple’s participation in Water.org’s Get Blue campaign. The nonprofit plans to use Ripple Payments and Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin to transfer money to microfinance partners that fund water and sanitation projects.
This is hardly Ripple’s first charitable publicity campaign involving XRP. In 2018, Ashton Kutcher and investor Guy Oseary appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show to announce a $4 million donation from Ripple to the Ellen DeGeneres Wildlife Fund. Kutcher praised Ripple, explained its technology to the audience, and demonstrated the transfer using XRP on television.
Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen later committed $5 million to “Change the Code, Not the Climate,” a Greenpeace USA and Environmental Working Group campaign pressuring Bitcoin developers and users to abandon its proof-of-work-based consensus mechanism. Many Bitcoin supporters viewed the campaign as an attack on a competing network financed by an executive whose wealth was closely linked to XRP.
No XRP in the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve!
I’m not a maximalist. Exodus lists a lot other than bitcoin.
bitcoin is the most decentralized asset with a fixed supply. The battle of 2017 proved this.
Ripple can change anything about XRP at any time.
No XRP in the reserve! https://t.co/DYFLSJZ1Tw
— JP Richardson (@jprichardson) January 28, 2025
Criticism of Ripple from the greater crypto industry also picked up last year around conversations and debate regarding which specific digital assets should be included in a potential federal crypto reserve. “Ripple can change anything about XRP at any time,” posted Exodus CEO JP Richardson at the time. “No XRP in the reserve!”
Charity has repeatedly supplied Ripple with positive publicity while the company sold enormous quantities of XRP. For years, Ripple financed a significant portion of its operations through XRP sales. The SEC previously alleged that the company raised more than $1.38 billion through XRP sales to finance its operations, while co-founder Chris Larsen and CEO Brad Garlinghouse also made approximately $600 million through their own unregistered sales.
XRP reached approximately $3.65 last summer as traders anticipated the resolution of the SEC case and speculated that the token could be included in a federal digital-asset reserve. It is now trading near $1.06. That is a decline of roughly 71%, even with Damon, Water.org, and a new charitable partnership available to help make Ripple’s latest pitch look respectable.
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