Inside The Trumps’ Crypto Plans with $TRUMP, $MELANIA, and World Liberty Financial
The Trump family is playing with fire out of the gate as their memetokens tanked on inauguration day
As we covered this weekend, the Trump family made waves in the crypto world by launching not one, but two memecoins: $TRUMP and $MELANIA. For a family that previously dismissed the idea, the sudden pivot has sparked debate across the industry.
Today, we’re recapping their launches, their implications for crypto’s future in the U.S., and the constitutional questions they raise as President Trump begins his second term. As always, we covered all these topics and more with Dragonfly VC Rob Hadick in our Monday Live Show. Let’s dig in…
A Blitzkrieg Start to the Trump Crypto Era
Sometimes you really can have too much of a good thing. It appears we got that after Trump’s memecoin launch on Friday, when Melania Trump dropped her own $MELANIA memecoin. Only 15% was set aside for the public, it’s launch was painful in relation to Trump’s with many users unable to swap in on Sunday, and the coin tanked 70% on Monday. Overall, it was not well received, with even ardent Trump supporters calling on the President to fire whichever person advised him to follow up with a second memecoin launch so soon after the first.
Rob Hadick echoed that take on our space saying, “my opinion on all of this, which was maybe not good or at least good and bad — that changed a lot when $MELANIA dropped and kind of what we saw happen over the course of the weekend.”
As Coinage host Zack Guzman highlighted this weekend, there were likely legal reasons behind why the Trump team rushed these coins out the door. It could have raised a lot of questions about whether Trump is just using the office to profit (which is strictly prohibited in the Constitution) if he launched them after being sworn in.
A Tale of Two Projects
While memecoins grabbed headlines, the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial DeFi platform is where the real opportunity for the Trumps is (and arguably, where the real conflict of interest gets even bigger.)
It’s essentially just a Trump branded DeFi platform built in partnership with one of the largest existing DeFi platforms in Aave. The Trump team behind it offered a chunk of tokens that will power this platform and future revenue fees from it, in order to align on attracting more liquidity. The hope is that a bunch of money will flow in, users will also want to buy the WLFI token that powers the platform, and everyone wins.
But as WLFI has attracted investors from around the world, that project, too, has raised questions. For one, they are limiting purchases to accredited investors — which is kinda frowned upon in crypto, since, you know, that excludes a lot of people (As Coinage’s own NFT-enabled co-op model has shown, there are ways to democratize ownership in the U.S. while staying compliant with regulations.) The Trumps’ approach, however, raises questions about whether this project truly embodies the spirit of decentralized finance.
And on top of it, suddenly a Trump-aligned platform that purports to have a lot of capital attached to it is in a negotiating position of power to choose which tokens it wants to onboard. Foreign-based projects and founders, like Tron founder Justin Sun, have invested in the platform and in-turn, World Liberty announced they would be adding more Tron tokens ($4.7 million) to the platform:
It’s all very interesting, and somewhat worrying, considering all of these things open up potential ways for the Trump family to profit considerably from foreign actors (which again is kinda a grey area — and as the recent Supreme Court ruling showed, Trump can certainly do things outside his “official” capacity as President (especially if all these projects came about before the inauguration. Speaking of the inauguration…
Trump’s Pastor Pumped a Memecoin, Too
We aren’t joking. The Detroit pastor Lorenzo Sewell, who delivered what actually was a beautiful inauguration sermon, turned around and promoted a memecoin someone launched and sent to him.
“I need you to do me a favor to go and go and get that coin in order for us to accomplish the vision that God has called us to do on Earth,” he said.
$LORENZO pumped to a total market cap of about $11 million before tanking to below $1 million. Glory be to God.
The Sins of Man
In what is now a legendary mea culpa in crypto circles, we saw more examples of people not being aware their actions are usually always traceable on the blockchain.
Students for Trump Chair Ryan Fournier got called out after promoting and then dumping $TRUMP and a TikTok coin and then lied to people about it. After realizing people could see he said, “I literally sold because it was going down increasingly. I don’t know who wouldn’t do that.”
📅 What’s Next?
Legislation/Approval Watch: Will Trump’s actions galvanize bipartisan support—or fracture it further? Up first, confirmation votes for some pretty key positions, including votes on Congressional sub-committees like the Digital Assets Subcommittee. For now, SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda got named acting SEC Chair to replace Gary Gensler.
Meme Coin Mania: After the Trump launch, people are waiting in fear (anticipation?) for how many others will follow suit?
El Salvador: Tether’s team just relocated to El Salvador. Coinage is heading down to the Plan B Summit to see what it’s all about down there. We will be reporting back on what we find.
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"i don't know the guy, Never heard of him." lol