#353: TRUMP and Its Implications
🤪 Has the euphoria stage of the market cycle begun?
Friday January 17th, 7:30pm
My wife and I arrived early to the 8pm show for Dr. Phil Live show by Adam Ray (a standup comedian pretends to be Dr. Phil and interviews popular guests, hilarious stuff and the actual Dr. Phil approves haha).
I’m proud of myself because I put my phone on silent during dinner at 6 and didn’t check it since then. We arrived at the venue early, so it was time to catch up on notifications and X.
On X, there was only one topic everyone was talking about: Did Donald Trump launch a memecoin and is it a scam?!
Everyone was running around with their digital heads cut off while I was getting ready for some laughs.
With skilled sleuths like cygaar sharing their findings, I figured this was worth a swing and swapped for some TRUMP, forced to sit on my hands and not check my phone since the show was about to start.
Aside from all the positive crypto news that has come out in the past few days, the only comps I had for this type of announcement were Bored Ape Yacht Club’s ‘Fuck It. Mutants Saturday.’ post, Yuga’s Otherside announcement (also on a Friday night), and Azuki’s ‘check your wallets’ announcement for the Beanz airdrop.
And honestly, they all pale in comparison to this one. We’re talking about the President of the United States!
Memecoins
Before we continue, I’ve occasionally covered memecoins for a while and with increasing frequency as the meta has persisted and grown. For new folks (hey there!), here is a lovely selection of bedtime reading if you want to dig deeper:
Whether we love or hate them, they’re here to stay. They’re a proxy for attention, can reach ridiculous and volatile valuations, and turn broke wallets into millionaires (and the other way around) overnight.
Thanks to memecoin launchpads like pump.fun, creating a memecoin takes minutes and growth has exploded since its launch less than a year ago.
The first degree impacts of TRUMP
Although memecoins have onboarded new users, there’s been nothing quite like this:
By Saturday evening, more than 400k new users onboarded to Moonshot, a popular mobile app for buying memecoins that was a launch partner for token. Aside from Trump himself, they were probably the biggest winner from this.
Moonshot also reached 1 million+ DAU
Moonshot was the #5 app in the iOS top downloads chart, rivaling VPN apps in response to the TikTok ban
The Crypto.com app changed its app title to include TRUMP for ASO (App Store Optimization) purposes and updated its screenshots to highlight the TRUMP and MELANIA tokens (yes, there’s a memecoin for her too, but we won’t get into that lol)
Chainalysis released a report on TRUMP and MELANIA holders with some interesting stats
~50% of TRUMP/MELANIA token holders have never bought a Solana altcoin (tokens on the Solana blockchain excluding $SOL and stablecoins) before.
Nearly half of the buyers created their wallets the day they purchased the tokens
A very large majority of wallets that hold TRUMP/MELANIA hold less than $100 worth, which suggests a significant amount of retail activity
It’s undeniable that TRUMP has onboarded the (literal) millions that we’ve been calling for, albeit in a way that many of us may not prefer.
I hope we see this as a glass half full type of moment, regardless of what we think about Trump or memecoins. As I shared in The Memecoin Super(onboarding)cycle:
NBA Top Shot brought in a lot of new users, with over 80,000 unique buyers in February 2021 alone. Many of these users eventually migrated into NFTs, with some of them eventually becoming entrepreneurs, creators, or contributors to the ecosystem. I’m one of these people brought here by speculation and the potential of making it big. So are many others I’ve met over the years.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, memecoins are bringing in a new cohort and class of users into our world, potentially confirming the Memecoin Supercycle hypothesis.
Some of them are using a crypto wallet for the first time (fortunately with a much better onboarding experience). Some of them are learning about slippage and swapping. Some of them are going to lose their money and confirm that crypto is indeed a scam.
And some of them will stick around, wondering what else is happening in this wacky corner of the universe. And that’s when the Memecoin Super(onboarding)cycle begins.
The second degree impacts of TRUMP
The second degree effects of Trump launching TRUMP are equal parts concerning and interesting.
Concerning
Now that a head of state has launched an official memecoin, basically anything is game in the world of memecoins. Or as the trenches call it, it’s “crime szn”.
In the past few days:
Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs account launched 4 memecoins and rugged them all. Unclear if it was an inside job or a hack, likely the latter.
Brazilian politician Marco Feliciano’s account was hacked and announced a scam memecoin
The Catholic News Agency was hacked and launched a scam memecoin
The pastor who gave Trump’s inauguration prayer was sent a memecoin and endorsed it, with proceeds going to his church
Fake rumors circulated that MrBeast would launch a memecoin and he had to publicly state he would not create one
The other concerning part of the TRUMP memecoin is the tokenomics, which are shared on the website. 20% of supply is circulating for the first 3 months, and afterwards, the remaining 80% of supply will be released on a monthly basis for the remaining 21 months.
No one knows what will happen to TRUMP’s price, but once April comes around ‘Creators & CIC Digital’ may start selling tokens into the open market onto unsuspecting buyers and holders.
Based on these trends, it’s likely we’ll see a lot more hacks, fake ‘official’ launches, and scams floating around. Stay vigilant folks 🫡
Interesting
On the other hands, the TRUMP launch has led to other interesting developments:
Multiple asset managers have filed for memecoin ETFs (this does not mean they’ll get approved, TBD)
Trump was asked a question about his memecoin and responded to it
Mark Cuban calls out TRUMP’s predatory tokenomics and proposes a similar model with token revenue going to the US Treasury to reduce the country’s debt
The creator of Vine (a social video app that was the predecessor to TikTok and acquired by Twitter in 2013 and shut down in 2016) launches a VINE memecoin, referencing Elon’s interest in bringing back the app and teased a surprise for Vine’s birthday tomorrow
The latter two points are particularly interesting because we’re seeing the creators thinking about memecoins beyond their greatest strength: driving attention.
Instead of get attention —> make price go up —> sell for profit, it turns into:
Cuban: Get attention —> make price go up —> use proceeds to pay off US debt
VINE: Get attention —> make price go up —> ???
Driving attention with intention
If the legal gloves are off with memecoins, what could a person or entity do with it if they got more creative?
The simple answer is we bring back a recycled version of NFTs and their promise of access (token-gating), decision-making, and rewards.
Balaji shared a hypothetical over the weekend with TRUMP, its large market cap, and the President’s sizable audience (excerpt is from 2nd half of post):
11) So, one way of solving the alignment problem would be for Trump to airdrop some TRUMP to every US citizen. However, it might be easier for him to just send an email in his personal capacity to every Trump supporter offering them some free TRUMP.
12) Specifically: he could give 72 hours notice and all kinds of Democrats would also sign up for his personal email list, just to get the airdrop.
13) Would it be legal? Well, it is certainly legal for politicians to email out *requests* for money. But to my knowledge no politician has attempted a personal airdrop before, to *give* away money — and certainly not at this scale.
13) At current valuations, Trump could give $100 of locked up TRUMP to all 77M Trump voters via airdrop and it would “only” cost him $7.7B in an asset that was worth zero two days ago. Heck, he could give $500 per person and still have $20B+ left over.
14) Yes, it would cost Trump some of his asset to do this. But if you needed to join his email list to get the coin, and if the airdrop could be effected without any cap gains, it would “pay for itself” by turning his base into even more rabid supporters.
15) It could even give him the political support necessary to completely destroy the Democrat patronage machine. Basically, by joining Trump’s email list and supporting his crypto policies you’d get a kind of UBI.
16) And if 77M Americans are also benefiting from TRUMP, charges of conflict of interest go away. It’d be a new kind of social contract, a personal relationship between President & citizen.
This certainly changes what incentives could look like when distributed across an audience of thousands, or millions.
It’s too early to say what memecoins can do in this new landscape, but emergent ideas and themes will pop up sooner than later.
Has the euphoria stage of the cycle begun?
If you were to ask me, it feels like Friday evening was a sign of the beginnings of the euphoria stage of the cycle. But as these things go, no one knows how long the music will last, especially with all the positive regulatory changes that have come out this week.
So hell, maybe we’re still a ways off from euphoria.
To show you some signs that silly season is here which was kicked off by the Trump memecoin:
On Tuesday, 8 of the top 10 top downloaded Finance apps were crypto-related
Degens are onboarding their parents to Moonshot (which is also pretty cool!)
And this gem of a conversation which I caught in a Discord server 😂
In the meantime, I’ll be enjoying the renewed energy in the space.
See you next week!
PS: I got some more Vector codes this week. Download the app and enter the invite code. If you don’t know what Vector is, I wrote about it here
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Another great article. This feels like an inflection point -- SocialFi is here and finally happening. In 2021 it started and sputtered out, but the idea made sense. Now, with clout.me and further integration w/X it definitely feels more tangible.
Crypto finally seems to have the sort of viral apps that were missing from the last cycle. With Vector's popularity rising it is starting to feel more like more of a mainstream moment.
Agreed, may do a piece on Clout next week!