| Watching Formula One's United States Grand Prix earlier this month, you'd have been forgiven for thinking you were in a time loop, catapulted back before FTX's demise and the spectacle of Sam Bankman-Fried telling a jury that poor management and not fraud was to blame for the collapse of his crypto exchange.
In fact, at least in the racing world, it sometimes appears as if the now-defunct crypto exchange never went bust at all. FTX's sponsorship of top-tier racing team Mercedes, signed in September 2021, meant that its branding decorated the shirts, hats and other merchandise that the racing team sold throughout 2022. Fans have continued to wear the accessories they bought a year ago. The longevity of brand marketing is a scary reality for those who took money from crypto sponsors when the market was at its height, with Mercedes only one of several major franchises to be weathering such a storm. A five-year sponsorship deal by Terra, the project behind tokens TerraUSD and Luna which spiraled to a $40 billion collapse in May of last year, continued to plague the Washington Nationals baseball team during the 2023 season. Partnering with an F1 team was and is still a status symbol for crypto companies, a flashy multimillion-dollar accessory that signals affluence and success at a time when market prices are still well below their bull-market highs. Crypto.com, Binance and OKX have all flocked to the circuits, the latter of which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on its five-year deal with British team McLaren in 2022. FTX's deal with Mercedes was signed two months before Bitcoin hit its all-time peak at nearly $69,000 — with both parties planning for the partnership to span "multiple race seasons," according to a statement at the time. When the crypto exchange collapsed last November, logos had to be taken off cars and race shirts, and Mercedes' team principal Toto Wolff had to answer to the media. "We considered FTX because they were one of the most credible and solid, financially sound partners that were out there," Wolff told outlets on a call in the days after FTX filed, reported here by ESPN. Bankman-Fried himself offered some insights on the attraction of sports sponsorships last week during testimony in his own defense about his involvement in seeking naming-rights deals for FTX, like the one it struck for the Miami Heat's basketball arena: "The average level sports fan could name dozens of stadium names, almost none of which I had never been to. It seemed to me at the time to give a level of brand awareness that was far above and beyond other partnerships we were involved with."
The power of that brand awareness means that for every FTX whose name gets wiped off an arena, there will be another sponsor waiting to take its place. But for those on the other side of the deal, beware: dead brands may stick around to haunt you. | 
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