PoliFi Tokens MAGA, HORRIS in Decline After U.S. Election Concludes

Does PoliFi have staying power? The market isn't so sure.

A day after Donald Trump was re-elected president of the United States, the crypto market seems to be losing interest in Political Finance (PoliFi) memecoins.

MAGA, the Trump-themed PoliFi token that is credited with creating the genre is down nearly 49% on-day, and nearly 50% during the last week. Its Kamala Kamala Harris-themed counterpart, trading as KAMA, is down 75% during the same time period.

The PoliFi tokens rose sharply during the election, largely tracking the performance of the candidates they are tied to in the polls and on Election Night. Now the question is, like prediction markets – Polymarket's betting volume consisted of 75% election-related markets, according to Dune – are PoliFi tokens ready for their next act.

In theory, PoliFi tokens are supposed to rise whenever there is a positive event involving the candidate they are tied to. For example, the KAMA token rose sharply after Harris was announced as Biden's running mate, and again after Trump mentioned her name during the first presidential debate.

Shortly after the MAGA token's launch in February, Mechanism Capital's Andrew Kang said in an interview that a Trump-themed PoliFi token leverages Trump's media presence in the attention economy, "and Trump is probably one of the best attention monopolizers in the world."

At the time, Kang also hedged his optimism for the token post-election by saying there might be a “sell the news” effect.

"However, I anticipate a period of consolidation following his election victory, similar to how dogecoin behaved after it became associated with Elon Musk," he said at the time.

The MAGA token has also struggled to hit higher levels of liquidity because it was blocked from major retail centralized exchanges (CEX). While the token trades on a number of decentralized exchanges (DEXs), and some lesser-known exchanges like Gate.io, MEXC, and BingX, it was blocked from being listed on Kraken, ByBit, and OKX.

Kraken, for its part, lists the satirical TREMP, as well as BODEN.

It could also be that traders are shifting into bitcoin (BTC) after the election, as bitcoin blew past its all-time high, with some bullish market observers calling for $100k by the end of the year. Potentially challenging that thesis, however, is that memecoins are up by 12% on-day, according to CoinGecko data, and one would expect them to drop as well if traders were broadly shifting into BTC.

Of course, number-go-up isn't the only use case for PoliFi tokens. They are also a ticket to a community, which, if done correctly, is a staying power longer than short-term profit or losses.