Womp Womp!! Crypto Bros Mad - Shitstain's Meme Coins Taking Money THEY Wanted To Scam

[hatrack]

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Nic Carter was biting into a cookie at the Crypto Ball, the digital asset industry’s star-studded celebration of a president who had assured them he would support the nascent sector, when he learned that Donald Trump was launching a cryptocurrency named after himself. Suddenly, the party atmosphere took on a sour note. “I was pretty dismayed by it,” Carter, a Trump voter and general partner at Castle Island Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in crypto start-ups, said in a phone interview Friday. “It cheapens his embrace of the crypto industry.”

Trump’s new coin, $TRUMP, is an example of what insiders call a meme coin — a digital token traded largely to capitalize on jokes or online enthusiasm rather than as a practical financial asset. It had a market capitalization of $5.8 billion late Friday, a sizable worth for a week-old project. But Carter fears the presidential crypto coin makes Trump’s promises to ease regulation on the sector appear self-serving and creates conflicts of interest. “It makes it look like quid pro quo,” he said.

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There’s also disappointment from some who, like Carter, think his launch of the $TRUMP meme coin — followed days later by $MELANIA, named for his wife — amplifies one of the sillier and sometimes scammier aspects of the scandal-associated industry. Meme coins are generally much more volatile than widely held crypto tokens such as bitcoin, and more vulnerable to hacks and fraud. Many are based on online jokes, like $PNUT, named for Peanut the Squirrel, an Instagram-famous pet euthanized by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation last year.

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A Wall Street Journal editorial Wednesday said Trump’s and his wife’s coins create “flashing-red political risks and ethical conflicts,” because entities with interests before the federal government might try to influence the president by saying they intend to buy, or have bought, $TRUMP tokens. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment. When Fox News this week asked David Sacks, a tech investor and Trump’s “artificial intelligence and crypto czar,” if the Trump coin creates a conflict of interest, he said no. Sacks instead described it as a “collectible,” like a baseball card or a stamp. “I’m not a regulator,” he said, “but my personal opinion is that it’s totally fine.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/01/25/trump-coin-crypto-melania/