The Trump Meme Coin Meltdown Shows the Unstable Alliance Between MAGA and Crypto

The cryptocurrency industry was having the time of its life. It was Friday evening, and the best-connected players were canoodling in Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium for the first presidential inauguration Crypto Ball

The cryptocurrency industry had high hopes for the Trump administration, especially after several key players in the crypto space met with the president-elect during the transition and helped organize the first-ever presidential inauguration Crypto Ball. But Trump’s decision to launch his own cryptocurrency, $TRUMP, left a sour taste in the mouths of many crypto enthusiasts.

The cryptocurrency, which was announced by Trump on his Truth Social platform on Friday evening, is a pool of 20 million “meme coins” that fans can buy and trade on the Solana blockchain. The launch came as a surprise to many at the Crypto Ball, who were expecting Trump to use the event to highlight and legitimize cryptocurrencies as a serious form of digital commerce. Instead, they got Trump shilling his own meme currency, which is more akin to Dogecoin—the namesake for the already-inefficient Department of Government Efficiency—than anything else.

After the announcement, several crypto figures expressed disappointment and concern. Investor Nic Carter, who was a guest at the ball, told Politico that the $TRUMP launch was an “absolutely preposterous” move that was “plumbing new depths of idiocy.” (As he later wrote on X: “Trump rugged all of his biggest fans by dropping his memecoin during the crypto ball when we were all sloshed.”) YK Pek, a crypto consultant, claimed on X that Trump “has the wrong people in his ear re crypto policy.” ZeroLend co-founder Gafoor Khan referred to the memecoin situation as “heartbreaking,” while the influencer Ash Crypto groused, “Our industry is a fcking joke.” In a conversation with news outlet the Block, the CEO of the research firm Two Prime Digital Assets declared that the Trump meme coin would “bring us more towards a crypto casino than true reform.”

The jitters intensified on Sunday afternoon when first lady Melania Trump announced her own “Melania Meme” launch via Truth Social—a new $MELANIA meme coin that is also tradable on the Solana blockchain. Martin Shkreli predicted that it’s “basically over for all crypto for a while.” The investment manager Michael A. Gayed referred to the meme coins as “A FUCKING DISGRACE.” CNBC Africa TV host Ran Neuner accused the presidential family of “grifting at the expense of the entire crypto community.” There were many such cases. The investment bank TD Cowen even worried that the meme coin uproar could distract Congress from passing the type of industry-friendly legislation for which crypto executives had so fervently lobbied.

The fears had not subsided by the time Trump was sworn in, especially since the reelected president didn’t mention cryptocurrencies once during his speech. Still, the foot soldiers fell right back into line on Tuesday after the new administration made some welcome moves: enshrining a new “crypto task force,” under the aegis of the once-crypto-hostile Securities and Exchange Commission, that would seek industry input on regulatory matters; and granting a presidential pardon to Ross Ulbricht, the onetime operator of the infamous dark-web drug marketplace Silk Road. (Ulbricht’s early adoption of Bitcoin, both within Silk Road and outside it, made him a folk hero to crypto enthusiasts.) Trump himself, at a Tuesday press conference, had just this to say about $TRUMP: “I don’t know where it is. I don’t know much about it, other than I launched it.”

Extremely misleading headlinerather disappointed. I repurchased my position after seeing the clipfor those who havent https://t.co/6iM7gHGeHP pic.twitter.com/Yax8I3UYFH

The crypto-world drama that Trump’s team spurred with this meme coin gambit is indicative of an ever-present tension between the once-crypto-skeptical Trump and his newfound armies of single-issue loyalists.

The more bitter crypto traders aren’t wrong to suspect possible Trumpian self-enrichment via digital money. Much of $TRUMP’s supply is held by two companies: Fight Fight Fight LLC, a firm established in Delaware earlier this month; and CIC Digital, a branch of the Trump Organization. $MELANIA is sold by MKT World LLC, the company that Melania Trump established after her husband’s first term in order to hawk NFTs and other digital “collectibles.” As the New York Times has noted, MKT World shares an address with the Florida-based Trump International Golf Club.

More to that point, many of the companies whose leaders had lobbied Trump and sponsored the Crypto Ball began listing $TRUMP on their exchanges over the weekend: Coinbase, Robinhood, and Kraken, the latter of which also listed $MELANIA. (All of their mobile apps saw a spike in downloads after the first meme coin launch.) Detractors had also expressed suspicion that $TRUMP’s sudden launch was timed specifically to allow traders who weren’t at the ball to buy up the tokens first and push up