Trump Took Meme Coin Mainstream

From his explosive debut on the presidential trail in 2015, Donald Trump’s career in national politics was uniquely intertwined with internet culture. The trolls of 4Chan and the ascendant alt-right embraced him as a living meme, someone whose ability to offend the mainstream and bulldoze social norms could reshape the political conversation as we knew it.

About a decade later, Trump is mainstream — at least online, thanks to a collection of Silicon Valley billionaires who funded his 2024 campaign and have tailored their social media platforms to the taste of the MAGA movement. Yes, Trump has his own Truth Social, but the Elon Musk-owned X (formerly Twitter) is just as inundated with far-right propaganda, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram have removed important safeguards against misinformation and hate speech. Amidst all this, cryptocurrency assets are skyrocketing in value thanks to Trump’s unsubtle promises to deregulate an industry that also brought millions into his comeback.

Of course, Trump has never been one to let an easy buck slip away. While in 2021 he dismissed bitcoin as “a scam against the dollar“, he continued to complain about crypto investors at the Bitcoin 2024 conference last summer, after which he launched World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance platform, in September. “Whether we like it or not, I have to do it,” he said of the crypto business at the time But it was just before his second inauguration, when he launched the so-called “meme” cryptocurrencies $TRUMP and $MELANIA, that Trump’s parasitic addiction to internet hype for came full circle—and cemented his status as a walking, talking meme. With this money grab, Trump at once normalized a bizarre and ephemeral type of investment that was once a niche joke and risked alienating the army of self-serious crypto evangelists who saw him as a savior of the blockchain-based economy.

Meme coins are born

Meme coins can be traced back to 2013, when two software developers decided to create a satire of bitcoin, the first major cryptocurrency and much buzzed about at the time. They called it “Dogecoin” after “doge”, the name of a series of popular memes featuring an internet famous Shiba Inu dog. However, contrary to the expectations of dogecoin’s inventors, the token took on a life of its own and soon became a regularly traded asset. Over time, it gained influential fans — none more prominent than Musk, who says he owns a certain amount of the coin (how much isn’t clear) and that it’s his “favorite” cryptocurrency. (His new commission under Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, is a nod to the meme, and its website briefly featured an illustration of a Dogecoin.)

Musk’s affinity for Dogecoin can be explained by what made it a relative success in the first place: the power of memes. The value of this token and the subsequent meme coins it inspired lies in the virality of the concept it represents. There is no other underlying or material value to the coin other than how a critical mass of extremely online people feel about it. In that sense, buying some is almost like buying shares in a meme – it’s so tenuous and risky, with price swings determined by the whims of the crowd. The results are often absurd: something called “speedcoin“, for example, currently boasts a market cap of more than $1.5 billion. Meanwhile, $HAWK, or “Hawk Tuah coin,” launched in December with the endorsement and likeness of the viral star-turned-influencer, crashed Haliey Welch, down and burned within hours, sparking allegations of a scam and a class action lawsuit against her partners in the project, who have denied wrongdoing but have not publicly addressed it the allegations in the case.

Here comes Donald Trump

Trump’s tumultuous foray into this space was, as he signaled last year, something of an inevitability: it combines his habit of selling every imaginable kind of junk to the MAGA faithful, typically emblazoned with his name and/or face (the image linked to the $ TRUMP shows him raising a fist and wearing the all-caps text “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT“) and his penchant for opaque financial arrangements (80 percent of the coin’s supply is owned by the entities CIC Digital LLC, which falls under the corporate umbrella of the Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC, a new company whose ownership has not been disclosed). As it appears, and contrary to some reports, the exact size of Trump’s stake and its current value cannot be confirmed, although he potentially holds the equivalent of several billion dollars. After he announced the coin on Friday, it rose to prices in the mid-$70s before falling to a plateau in the high $30s. ($MELANIA skydived too, and now sits under $4.)

It goes without saying that such a venture is unprecedented for a future president and raises a number of regulatory and ethical questions. But it also represents a striking pivot to the pattern of widespread market speculation that makes meme coins at all viable. By a metric, a much larger group of investors traded the Trump token over the past few days than during the biggest meme coin launches in the past year. Whether it reflects widespread belief in the potential to turn the president’s popularity into easy profit, or a sudden influx of MAGA crypto-newbies eager to buy into Trump’s image, or a mix of these effects, the result is a market cap of more than $7 billion, all for an “asset” based on nothing but vibes.

‘The Fartcoin Stage in the Market Cycle’

This strange, unpredictable territory — the mainstreaming of a meme coin by the leader of the free world that also serves as its brand — was this week described by hedge fund billionaire David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital as the “Fartcoin” stage of the market cycle.” in one investor letter. “Besides trading and speculation, it serves no other obvious purpose and fulfills no need not served elsewhere,” he wrote, pointing out that there is no theoretical limit to the number of nonsense tokens that can be minted in the bullish atmosphere , which is created. upon Trump’s return to the White House. “Maybe we’re exiting the Fartcoin stage of the market and entering the Trump (and Melania) memecoin stage,” he added. “It’s anyone’s guess what will happen next, but it feels like it’s going to be wild.”

Hints of this kind of crazy volatility rubbed some of Trump’s crypto cronies the wrong way. Industry insiders who have worked to legitimize bitcoin and similar currencies felt it undermined their sector’s reputation and were particularly annoyed when the rollout of $MELANIA instantly diluted whatever value $TRUMP might have had. A partner at a crypto venture capital firm said the tokens felt “very smart and cheapwhile others worried that people unfamiliar with crypto might come to think of it as nothing more than a casino powered by boom-and-bust cycles of gimmick coins. As a would-be ambassador for their cause, Trump instead annoyed crypto-enthusiasts with what many assumed was the lineup for a “carpet pull” — where the president would sell a large part of the asset and leaving ordinary investors with worthless coins – or just a convenient tool for anyone (including foreign interests) to channel money to his business.

This disillusionment may not be new to Trump voters, who have occasionally been caught off guard when his actions don’t match a fantasy of how he will engage with the issues they care most about. But this is a man known for bending reality around himself, and it’s entirely possible that he could push crypto in the direction of his usual get-rich-quick merchandising without thinking about its long-term future, and while loosening SEC enforcement in ways that allow others to follow suit without fear of consequence. The industry’s loudest and wealthiest executives had called for an end to the agency’s crackdown, but didn’t seem to foresee that this could open the door to problems like meme coin mania — promoted by the president, no less.