Of Mice and Melania
Did the first lady just kill the memecoin market?
The man who is to be inaugurated on January 20th launched a cryptocurrency on January 17th - a coin that does nothing, offers holders no perks, and will almost certainly collapse in price when supply held by insiders can start hitting the market in 3 months. I briefly covered it for Seeking Alpha over the weekend:
Again, 80% of the supply is locked for creators and CIC Digital. Another 4% or so is held cumulatively by various centralized exchanges like OKX and Kraken. We can see an absolutely enormous percentage of TRUMP is held by the top 20 addresses. 88.5% of the total coin supply is held by just 20 wallets. If it hasn't been deduced by the reader at this point already, I'll be overt; I wouldn't buy this coin with free money.
You can read the entire piece with this freebie link… at one point on Sunday, TRUMP had a fully diluted market capitalization of $72 billion. TRUMP’s Poocoin had a larger market cap than Nintendo, CVS Health CVS 0.00%↑, FedEx FDX 0.00%↑, and Target TGT 0.00%↑.
Somehow, the market was originally okay with Trump’s coin. Just as it had been okay with Bonk, Shiba Inu, and something called SPX6900.
Then the unthinkable…
Melania dropped a coin too. And all hell broke loose.
Trump’s memecoin fell in value by over 50% in less than an hour. Bitcoin fell back below $100k from $106k. Solana fell over 10%. And the hand-wringing from CryptoTwitter intensified. Apparently, for a market that had allowed DOGE, dogwifhat, Peanut the Squirrel, Pepe, and Fartcoin; Melania was a step too far.
Listen, I’m not going to get all sanctimonious here. I’m quite sure those of you who have been reading this blog for longer than a few weeks have a rough idea of where I fall on this:
So even as Bitcoin prices hit new all time highs in spite of monthly active users at multi-year lows, the ‘killer app’ of the crypto world continues to be printing money with memes and narratives.
I don’t disagree that Trump’s coin is unbecoming - I actually think it’s a pretty terrible look for him - but where has the outrage been for crypto-grift from within the community? Why did it take the wife of the guy who created Trump Tower, Trump Steaks, Trump College, and Trump Casinos creating a coin to trigger a brief come to Jesus moment in markets?
To the non-crypto-following outsider looking in, this behavior is probably shocking. I can assure you, this is the market we’ve had for some time. And no, I don’t think everyone in this space just became a utility coin investor overnight simply because the Trump family is mocking them mining their liquidity.
Nothing has changed. Trump didn’t create pump and dumps. He’s just doing what he has always done - monetizing his brand. Does that change Trump family memecoins being a terrible look? In my eyes no. But let’s be honest here, the crypto market was generally a dumpster fire casino long before Melania’s coin dropped. At least to some degree, we deserve this because we haven’t prioritized utility over get rich quick attempts with this technology. At some point this will change. But I have my doubts about that day being today.
If I can give one piece of advice to the Bitcoin maxis who I’m sure have tricked themselves into believing their digital trinket is the morally superior cryptocurrency in the market, it would be this…
Just shut up.
Your orange-coin religion is a meme as well. Nobody actually uses Bitcoin. It can’t scale on the main layer. The belief that Lightning Network - or something like it - will fix scalability is no different than believing Lucy will hold the football in place. The mining space is becoming increasingly more centralized as each year passes. The guy who used the coin to buy a pizza is generally snickered at by the community even though he was using Bitcoin exactly how Satoshi Nakamoto intended it to be used.
And all of this was a conscious choice.
Play your little Runes pogs. Play your little Ponzis. And f*** off!
Okay, roast over. I hope you guys enjoyed it and are off to a great start to 2025!
Disclaimer/Disclosure: I’m long Bitcoin, shitcoins, and shitcos. I have no idea when this halving cycle mania will peak. I highly doubt any of us will sell the top, so be careful out there. I don’t actually think Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme.