Coinbase’s Oscars ad says you’re an NPC trapped in someone else’s financial system–and crypto is ‘Your Way Out’

The ad is extraordinary for what it captures in the culture: an ever-gnawing desperation to escape what’s become known as the “permanent underclass.” The phrase, once niche Silicon Valley gallows humor, has become a genuine cultural fixation. As leaders of AI companies boast that their technology will replace most jobs within the next decade, people are worried they’ll be sorted into a category Karl Marx once called the lumpenproletariat: the lowest stratum of the industrial working class itself.

Only it’s 2026, and the word for it is the permanent underclass, a world with no upward mobility. Online, the term is lobbed at people who aren’t heeding AI’s headwinds, the kinds of FOMO-stoking posts that happen to work very well for selling. Which, of course, is what Coinbase is doing.

“Today, because of the maturity of Coinbase, we have a broader set of products that we think can offer true alternatives to an outdated system,” Catherine Ferdon, Coinbase’s CMO, said in a statement sent to Fortune.

The whole thing was shot using real actors and no CGI, Toby-Treyer Evans, the founder of the advertising agency that produced it, wrote in advertising trade site Muse by Clio. The game-world look was built in-camera, using suits with printed-on fabric details and pixelated set design made to look indistinguishable from a video game. Extras were trained to walk like game characters, Treyer- Evans wrote. It’s a genuine feat of filmmaking, and it isn’t Coinbase’s first. The company has built a reputation for splashy, viral big-event ads, including their memorable Super Bowl ad.

The ad’s central metaphor, the NPC, is a cultural artifact of that same corner of the internet. “Non-playable character” started as a gaming term, then by 2018 became a political meme to describe people who parrot talking points without thinking. Now, it’s Gen-Z’s default insult for anyone who appears to be on autopilot: going through the motions, lacking agency, playing by someone else’s rules. It sounds like the classic complaint the youth have always had about the status quo: “you’re the system, man!”

But this is different. These fears are shared by most Americans, and validated by the very people building the technology everyone’s afraid of. The noise around AI and its potential effects has grown so loud that you don’t need to be a 17-year-old dorm-room philosopher to conclude: a lot of people are about to lose control of their financial lives and not even realize it.

Coinbase’s answer, naturally, is to trade cryptocurrency. The pitch is compelling because it’s true that crypto has created real wealth for people bold enough, and lucky enough, to invest at the right time. The number of crypto millionaires globally hit nearly 242,000 last year, up 40% in twelve months, according to Henley & Partners. An entire subculture has formed around the shared belief that the traditional financial system was never going to let them in anyway. Those “crypto bros” are now perfectly positioned to capitalize on the broader anxiety about AI and displacement.

But for every crypto millionaire minted in the past two years, there are retail investors who lost their savings in the FTX collapse, got liquidated on leveraged bets they didn’t fully understand, or watched memecoins they bought on hype go to zero. FTX itself ran a Super Bowl ad in 2022—the same year as Coinbase’s famous ad—starring Larry David dismissing crypto as a fad. The company turned out to be a multibillion-dollar fraud. 

So even if the permanent underclass may or may not be coming, the ads for it are already here.