Coinbase's "Everything Is Fine" ad never aired in the UK. Here’s why.

Set in a decaying version of Britain (overflowing bins, rats in the streets, £100 fish fingers, among other things) the two-minute ad paired cheery singing with visuals of systemic economic failure. It ends with a punchline: “If everything’s fine, don’t change anything.”

The ad struck a nerve. Some called it accurate. Others called it tasteless. But, it never made it to TV.

‍Clearcast, the UK body that pre-approves television ads, blocked it from airing, arguing it pitched crypto as a fix for the country’s economic problems without sufficient evidence.

Coinbase’s CEO, Brian Armstrong, responded publicly, calling the decision censorship. He doubled down on the message:“The current financial system doesn’t work for most people. It needs to be updated.”

So, was the ad really saying that crypto can fix Britain?

Yes, in a way. The deeper message was more about alternatives, and crypto’s role in offering them. In terms of how that could look like in practice:

• Financial access: Stablecoins and DeFi tools allow people to send, save, or borrow without banks, avoiding costly fees and restrictions. In times of inflation, dollar-pegged assets can act as hedges against weakening local currencies.
• Real-world asset (RWA) tokenization: Platforms like ours are tokenizing assets like gold, creating tokens backed 1:1 by real, audited commodities. These tokens are tradable, divisible, and accessible, giving people a way to store value outside of volatile fiat systems.
• No intermediaries: On-chain finance removes gatekeepers. There’s no need to trust institutions that fail to deliver transparency, speed, or fairness. With programmable smart contracts, finance becomes more automated, more auditable, and more accountable.

None of this is risk-free. But that wasn’t the point of the ad. The point was this: if everything’s not fine, why keep doing things the old way?

Coinbase’s message was a provocation; regulators didn’t like the implication.