An Ad That Fell Apart After One Zoom

The Super Bowl is not only the championship game of American football – it is also the biggest marketing festival on the planet. Everything gets advertised here: from chips to crypto, from insurance to bets on who will drop the ball first. And against the backdrop of this massive spectacle, Logan Paul and Polymarket managed to land in a situation that became a perfect example of how “hype” can turn into a meme within just a few hours.

During Super Bowl 2026, a video spread across X showing Logan Paul supposedly “accidentally” caught on camera at the exact moment he was placing a $1 million bet on the Polymarket platform. According to the clip’s storyline, a random fan “captured the moment”: the influencer is sitting there, the game is on, emotions are running high – and suddenly he casually opens the app and places an enormous bet on the winner of the Chiefs vs 49ers matchup.

It looked like the perfect viral content: a million-dollar wager, the biggest game of the year, a celebrity, Polymarket – every element was in place. Too perfectly in place.

And this is where ZachXBT enters the story, as usual – the crypto detective who has long become something like the industry’s forest ranger. While some pretend everything is normal, he simply zooms in on the screen. One zoom – and the magic disappears. Users quickly noticed that Logan’s account balance shown on the screen was… $0.00. Absolute zero. The video shows $1,000,000 being typed into the “Buy Yes” field for the Kansas City Chiefs to win, but with an empty balance, such a bet could not physically be placed.

So this wasn’t even “poor execution.” It wasn’t even “they forgot to hide something.” This was the level of: “we filmed an ad, but didn’t even deposit a couple of dollars to make it believable.”

Social media, of course, did not forgive it. Instead of a wow effect, the platform received a wave of ridicule. People started making memes, joking about a “million-dollar bet without the million,” and comparing it to trying to buy a Lamborghini with a card that has a $0.00 balance. The Super Bowl is a place where ads cost millions – but this one looked like it was filmed with spare change from a coffee purchase.

ZachXBT stated directly: this was not an accident, but an obvious undisclosed advertisement. Especially since Polymarket had already appeared in one of Logan’s YouTube videos the day before. The connection was clearly pre-arranged, simply presented as an “organic moment.”

And that is exactly what raises the main question. Polymarket is a decentralized prediction platform where users place bets on real-world events: elections, sports, the economy, crypto markets. The idea itself is compelling: collective forecasting instead of experts, an open system instead of bookmakers.

But when promotion relies on staged scenes that fall apart at the first close-up, trust in the industry becomes even weaker.

And it’s not just Polymarket. ZachXBT noted that similar tactics are used by other prediction market players as well, including Kalshi. It creates the impression that marketing in this sector often follows the rule of “the louder, the better,” even if reality has to be slightly… painted over.

In the end, the clip did go viral – but not in the way it was intended. Polymarket wanted hype and the status of a platform where influencers place million-dollar bets. Instead, they got a meme about a $0.00 balance and yet another reminder: in crypto and around it, reputation breaks faster than a bet is placed.

If the idea was “look, this is the future of betting,” it ended up feeling more like: “look, this is the future of advertising that no one believes.”

A fragment of the video can be viewed in our Telegram channel.