Trump Proves Use Case for Crypto, Has Crypto Bros Turn on Him

By Jacob Weindling  |  January 21, 2025 | 12:33pm
Photo by The Trump White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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Trump Proves Use Case for Crypto, Has Crypto Bros Turn on Him

If you are looking for hope in a sea of horror right now, I know this may sound weird, but turn your eyes to crypto. This group of largely impressionable men in their 20s coalesced around a candidate who once wanted to ban Bitcoin before learning that its wealthiest and most influential holders voted Republican, then he became the crypto president. The tyranny of the Elizabeth Warren regime was over, and the dawn of crypto as a thing people take seriously was on its way, so the story goes.

Then Trump launched a shitcoin and all hell broke loose and now they’re quite mad at him just one day into his presidency.

It rocked the crypto markets, as the liquidity it brought hammered the leveraged positions that create these moonbois and moongirls, and crypto tanked then bounced then fell and today it is bouncing once again. Memecoins got crushed across the board, as people sold their old bullshit so they could buy the new shiny bullshit on the market. The official Trump coin is now the 25th largest crypto, and at its peak it had a market cap of $15 billion, which is bigger than that of Hyatt Hotels, Ralph Lauren and Domino’s Pizza.

But its market cap is currently $7.7 billion, in part because Melania launched her own shitcoin the day after Trump did. People then sold the old bullshit so they could buy the new shiny bullshit. There, I just taught you how to trade memecoins.

Because we live in a world where women are paid less for doing the same amount of work as men (in this case, none at all), Melania’s market cap is only currently $775 million. Her shitcoin has crashed too, from a peak of $2.6 billion.

To get an idea of how this affected the rest of the markets, PEPE, the 26th largest coin and exactly what you think it is bought by exactly the people that you think buy it, had holders predictably smash the sell button on their old bullshit mascot so they could buy their new bullshit mascot. Starting from its peak the day that Trump’s coin launched, PEPE is down a little under 25 percent as of this writing.

This dynamic gets worse the smaller the market cap gets. PNUT, a shitcoin created to honor the squirrel killed by New York who became a right-wing icon in the days leading up to the election, is down a little under 45 percent since Trump’s coin launched as of this writing. There are largely two types of crypto people upset with Trump right now. People who have 80 percent of their net worth in memes who are livid that their entire balance sheet wealth just got nuked, and the true believers who still think that crypto is a force for anti-corruption and transparent markets.

As Bitcoin expert and enthusiastic Trumper Nic Carter correctly pointed out, Trump is pioneering new and exciting innovations in bribery, as “creating a bunch of personal memecoins opens the door to secretive foreign buyers trying to curry influence with our leaders. If you hated hunter biden’s anonymous art sales, you should hate this too.”

The Official Trump Coin is a phenomenal idea for corruption. You get relative anonymity (to the public, crypto bros are kidding themselves if they think the NSA doesn’t know who owns every wallet by now) to make a contribution directly to Trump’s net worth and you never even have to talk to him to do it. All you have to do is open your wallet, load it with cash, navigate to your favored exchange, purchase Trump’s coin, then voila! You just helped Trump violate the emoluments clause!

Crypto has been plagued by its inability to create a killer app to bring it to the masses, and while the past crypto idealist that’s been beaten out of me would argue that stablecoins could be it in a world where this industry’s north star wasn’t pure uncut greed, these crypto bros should be thanking their daddy Trump for demonstrating a very valuable use case for a technology that they have helped ruin by turning it into a number go up machine. Autocrats across the world now see they can use crypto to create a funding network to enrich themselves and squash the free speech these Trump-loving crypto bros supposedly believe in. Congrats folks! You finally found a use case!

While I am giving these guys who very much deserve it a hard time, they also deserve credit for instantly seeing the grift. Sure, it’s because they see it every day, but that’s the point. They’ve watched this shit on a smaller scale with scammers, bots impersonating Elon, and a million Hawk Tuah types just trying to make a quick buck all destroy the credibility of their industry and make it the butt of everyone like mine’s jokes. It’s easy to shrug a lot of that off for true crypto believers because compared to the size of the industry, all this shitcoinery is very small and can be construed as a sideshow. But it hits different when the fucking president does it, and a ton of Trump-supporting crypto bros are genuinely pissed off at Trump. Here is but a sampling of what my timeline on my crypto Twitter alt has looked like since Trump launched his shitcoin.

If you are one of the upset twenty-something crypto bros reading this (or Nic Carter who after the election told me “I think you’ll be surprised!” when I said Trump would do one of the many things he’s proven to love doing), I want to drop the sarcasm and genuinely congratulate you. You just speedran the lifecycle of a disillusioned Trump voter faster than anyone ever has before. It took him abandoning us in a freaking pandemic for a lot of folks to see him for what he has always been, but he did the one thing you guys see more than anything and you immediately pegged him for who he is. Well done. It’s just too bad that all you folks who love to do your own research never looked into the history of a 78-year-old man with a love for talking a big game then scamming folks out of their hard-earned money.

 
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