The Crypto World Is Already Angry at Trump

Donald Trump never misses a good brand opportunity. You can buy collectible Trump trading cards, limited-edition autographed Trump guitars, $499 “Trump Won” low-top sneakers, and Trump-endorsed Bibles. Long before he got into politics, Trump peddled liquor (Trump Vodka), education (Trump University), and meat (Trump Steaks). But Trump’s latest enterprise—a new cryptocurrency token named $TRUMP—might be his most brazen yet.

After his team launched the token on Friday evening, the price per coin shot from $6 to more than $70 within about a day. Because two of Trump’s affiliate companies own 80 percent of the total supply of the coin, Trump essentially manifested more than $10 billion in a single weekend. At one point this weekend, Axios estimated that $TRUMP momentarily accounted for about 89 percent of Trump’s net worth, making him one of the richest people in the world. And last night, Melania Trump announced her own coin, $MELANIA.

Throughout Trump’s long history of cashing in on his personal brand, there has never been such a dramatic injection of artificial value. Both $TRUMP and $MELANIA are so-called memecoins. There are no business fundamentals under the hood, no practical use cases to speak of. Memecoins are typically spun up in a matter of minutes, whisked to massively overinflated valuations on social media, and promptly dumped on the suckers who bought in a few moments too late. It’s an incredibly efficient, incredibly predictable, and incredibly predatory playbook.

The arc of a memecoin’s market cycle almost always bends toward zero: A coin inspired by the “Hawk Tuah” girl was worth $500 million just after it launched late last year and swiftly lost 99 percent of its value. Other silly tokens, such as the inauspiciously named $BODEN (an unofficial, unsanctioned riff on President Joe Biden’s lame-duck era) have experienced similar collapses. It’s the same story in each case: Insiders and early adopters turn a quick profit at the expense of latecomers. And although it’s definitely possible that Trump’s position of global influence gives $TRUMP more staying power than the typical memecoin, it’s arguably even more volatile than cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, that are not exactly stable in their own right. The value of $TRUMP has already dipped by more than half and is now worth less than $8 billion.

In a sense, the $TRUMP token represents a natural move for the president. He has made an enormous effort to position himself as a powerful ally of the crypto industry: Trump has said he plans to create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile” and promoted another crypto business with his three sons just weeks before the election. Trump announced the coin on Truth Social on Friday night at the same time as the pre-inauguration “Crypto Ball,” a ritzy celebration emceed by David Sacks, a tech entrepreneur and podcast host whom Trump has tapped as his crypto czar. It was meant as a kind of debutante ceremony: After four years of what the industry has interpreted as targeted sanctions and harassment from SEC Chair Gary Gensler and other steely regulators, crypto is finally free to become the fullest version of itself.

Whether memecoins are even legal is a matter of dispute. Biden’s SEC regularly went after crypto companies for issuing coins that appeared to violate existing securities laws. But Trump himself is picking the next SEC chair. There’s also the question of what Trump’s new tens of billions of dollars on paper end up amounting to in the real world, because most of the total token supply hasn’t actually been issued, and because any attempt to start cashing out would no doubt tank the price. Still, even after Trump has promised a new golden age for crypto during his second administration, his new hypothetical billions practically cement his interest in a more hands-off approach to the industry. Keep in mind: Trump called bitcoin a “scam” just a few years ago, when crypto didn’t seem to suit his interests. Trump is far less likely to level those kinds of judgments in the future.

Another potential issue is that because memecoins are so lightly regulated, anyone can buy them, whether they are 12-year-olds with a parent’s credit card or North Korean hackers looking for leverage over the global economy. Some of the available supply of Trump’s official cryptocurrency might already be controlled by foreign interests. There’s also the chance that Trump’s memecoin gambit could inspire other world political and cultural leaders to release similar coins. (Lorenzo Sewell, the pastor who administered today’s inaugural prayer, has already announced a $LORENZO coin.) If foreign actors get their hands on Trump’s supposedly America-first economic initiatives, the administration’s promise to turn the country into a “bitcoin superpower” starts to feel a little hollower.

Although much of the crypto world has been eagerly awaiting Trump’s return to the White House, a new sense of unease has settled over some of the industry’s biggest defenders, who recognize that memecoins don’t exactly reflect well on crypto. Memecoins are “zero-sum,” the investor Balaji Srinivasan, typically aligned with Trump, reminded his followers on X over the weekend. “There is no wealth creation … And after an initial spike, the price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.” Nic Carter, a prominent crypto investor and Trump supporter, reasons that the unease is indicative of a broader panic, a slow-growing sense that Trump can’t be controlled in the way the industry might want. $TRUMP “exposed the worst parts of the crypto industry to the public eye in a way that really didn’t need to happen, right when we were on the cusp of legitimacy,” he told me today.

A Trump Steak might not be the juiciest cut you’ve ever eaten, but at least it’s a piece of real meat—something you can see and touch. $TRUMP enthusiasts won’t even get that much.