The TrumpCoin Cometh

Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Grift.

This wasn’t supposed to be my next article. I did not want to write an article about Trump’s memecoins. Unfortunately, after spending a few days watching journalists completely bungle the reporting on what will (hopefully) go down in history as the most audacious financial scam ever pulled by a president of the United States of America, I felt I should collect what we actually know about WTF just happened with this recent onslaught of Trump family themed pump and dump scams that were so outrageously brazen and immoral that even the crypto bros who love Trump started completely losing their shit on social media. “Why hast thou forsaken us in favor of a shitcoin scam?” was the cry heard all across The Social Media Wastes.

Do you know how hard it is to make a large majority of the “thought leaders” in crypto call anything out as a a scam much less something associated with the Messiah figure who has delivered them from the tyranny of the Securities and Exchange Commission? This is an industry best described by Hunter Thompson’s memorable turn of phrase: “[The crypto industry] is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.” And that’s the good part of the industry. The bad part of the industry involves things like fentanyl trafficking, Vladimir Putin, and Hezbollah.

Trump really has proven himself to be the G.R.O.A.T.

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WHAT IS A MEMECOIN?

A memecoin is just a crypto token¹ - the same exact thing as something like Tether’s USDT - except no one even pretends it has any utility or real world value. They can exist on any blockchain² but most of them live on a blockchain called Solana (made infamous for its close association with Sam Bankman-Fried) because it’s very cheap to send transactions on Solana. The fact that it’s very cheap to send transactions on Solana has led to a lot of scammers building up a lot of very efficient tooling for launching scams on Solana which leads to a lot of scams being perpetrated on Solana and so on in what amounts to a sort of virtuous cycle of fraudulence… on Solana. But you don’t need to understand anything about Solana or blockchains to understand memecoins.

The right way to think about trading memecoins is like a giant game of financial chicken. Let’s take an example: you and a small group of degenerate gamblers (“degens”) that you probably met in a video game that involves blowing each other away with guns gather around a campfire³ and decide to create a memecoin called FartCoin⁴. You all chip in the princely sum of around €1⁵ to create 1,000,000 FartCoins out of thin air which you divide amongst yourselves⁶. After the FartCoins have been divvied up between you, you all get up from the campfire and stride into The Social Media Wastes where you start tweeting, bleeting, and TikTok'ing about FartCoin’s virtues in the hopes that you can convince other people to buy some of your FartCoins.

If your merry band of FartCoiners can convince enough people to buy FartCoins then the price of FartCoin will go up, at which point other degens might notice that the price of FartCoins is going up and start buying FartCoins for themselves. Once these other degens own some FartCoins they will start to do their own social media posts about how great FartCoin is and how it’s going to make everyone rich, recruiting new degens to the cause. Rinse, repeat, etc.

Now in order to win this game of FartCoin chicken at some point you will have to sell your FartCoins for Real Money™️. If you sell too late (meaning after everyone else sells) there will be no buyers and you will lose all your money (womp womp) but if you hold your FartCoins as a million new suckers buy up tons of FartCoins you could make 1,000,000% returns (🚀🌕). Thus the game is to sell your FartCoins to suckers as close to the top as possible, before the (inevitable) crash in the FartCoin market.

FartCoin is all too real.

If everything about what I just described sounds incredibly stupid to you then congratulations, you’ve understood it perfectly. I would say, however, that memecoins are in some sense the most honest corner of the cryptoverse. Most crypto scams involve some bro promising to solve hunger in Eritrea or create peace in the Middle East⁷ if you just buy some of their FartCoins. Memecoins, however, dispense with all pretense in favor of full on degenerate gambling and social media engineering. Armed with a deep understanding of the Twitter or TikTok algorithm and command of a small army of AI chatbots you can make truly obscene amounts of money trading memecoins. Generational wealth amounts of money, even.

That’s just how the economy works these days.

It’s maybe worth mentioning that it has become extremely fashionable recently for “thought leaders” in the crypto industry to describe the world’s largest and most productive/profitable companies as being “boomer memecoins”. Make of that what you will.

Future generations will probably say there were signs.

Let me give you one final important insight: the only difference between bitcoin and a memecoin like FartCoin is that bitcoin came first. In other words, bitcoin is a memecoin. A lot of people have convinced themselves they don’t understand bitcoin when in reality they understand bitcoin just fine, they just can’t believe it could be as stupid as the thing they are envisioning. But it is exactly that stupid.

Courtesy David Gerard.

The only major difference is that the optimal strategy for the bitcoin game is slightly different than that for something like the FartCoin game. Hyping the token relentlessly on social media is of course core to both games but the bitcoiners lean more heavily on trying to convince all the other bitcoiners to never, ever, ever sell their bitcoins, no matter what - to “HODL”, in the parlance of the bros⁸. Because the last person to sell loses the game. If you can convince most of the people who have bitcoins to never sell well, then, you by definition can’t be the last to sell, right? But unlike bitcoin, which is at this point most accurately described as a religion, it’s pretty hard to convince someone to never, ever, ever sell something called FartCoin.

WAGMI⁹.

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OFFICIAL $TRUMP

First out of the gate was the Official TRUMP Meme token:

Might be a good time to rewatch Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.

It was announced as the First Official Inaugural Crypto Ball was taking place in Washington DC¹⁰. The crypto ball, as grotesque and utterly classless a sausage fest as the most grotesquely classless sausage fest you can possibly imagine, was attended by both the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United State Congress (Mike Johnson) as well as a delegation from Nexo, the Russian mafia’s favorite “crypto bank” whose offices were hit with a massive raid by Bulgarian authorities early last year¹¹.

Just think: only four years ago this man was lying to Liz Cheney’s face about how the Constitution works and now here he is, surrounded by scam artists in a freakshow of absolute cringe. They grow up so fast!

Some of the attendees were really excited about their new TRUMP tokens, as well they should be seeing as how they probably made¹² millions of dollars in just a few minutes out of absolutely nothing.

The local top wouldn’t be reached until 24 hours later when MELANIA token was released.

My personal favorite aspect of the TRUMP launch was the contractual terms and conditions on offer over on gettrumpmemes.com. Some back story: the crypto industry has been fighting back against government regulators for years now by attempting to claim that cryptocurrency tokens cannot be “investment contracts” because they are not “contracts”¹³. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars have been given to lawyers without consciences to enable them to boldly stroll into courtrooms all across the globe and claim that without a contract between the buyer and seller a crypto token cannot be an “investment contract” and if crypto tokens are not “investment contracts” then the laws that have dutifully protected retail investors from scam artists for almost 100 years do not apply to crypto tokens. In other words: it’s open season on retail chumps who think they can strike it rich by investing in FartCoin.

So what does this look like to you?

“For my friends, unlimited memecoins. For everyone else, the contract.” - Field Marshal Óscar Benavides

It’s also worth mentioning that despite all the hype and the big numbers it’s actually the case that 80% of the TRUMP tokens that were created are not available to be traded by anyone yet. Because, you see, the Trump insiders have reserved 80% of the tokens for themselves, to be slowly sold to suckers over the course of the first three years of the second Trump administration.

They probably figured unlocking billions of dollars in TRUMP tokens over the course of four years would be a little too obvious.

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OF MOONS AND MEN

Within minutes of the token’s launch the price of TRUMP proceeded to do the whole 🚀🌕¹⁴ thing that crypto bros love, going from $0.00 to $6.53 in roughly a minute and from there rapidly rising to $72 within a few hours, theoretically increasing Trump’s net worth by 2,000% with an (on paper) boost of almost $60 billion¹⁵ that briefly made him one of the world’s richest men (on paper - there are very important caveats to this number).

During that first minute someone with godlike market timing skills who was definitely not engaging in insider trading managed to a) decide the TRUMP token was real¹⁶ and b) buy $1 million dollars worth of TRUMP tokens. This godlike trader achieved over a 1,000% return on their investment within seconds. According to Bubblemaps as of Sunday they had managed to cash out a small chunk of their TRUMP tokens for $20 million in Real Money™️ and were still holding onto more than $90 million worth of TRUMP tokens to be sold later¹⁷.

All the data is public but I wouldn’t recommend digging into who was behind this trade unless you really have a burning desire to meet Kash Patel at some point in the next four years.

You’re probably wondering something like “wait, is that even legal?” To which the short answer goes something like “well it wasn’t legal yesterday but it’s almost certainly legal now”. A world where pump and dump scams are legal is the world American voters wanted and it’s the world they’re going to get. Buckle up.

Now early on in its lifetime TRUMP was mostly available to trade only on things called “decentralized exchanges” which I’m not going to explain right now though you can read my explanation of some of the details of how useful they are for laundering money for rogue nuclear states here. That changed when Justin Sun, a man who has been indicted by multiple federal agencies for insider trading and market manipulation and is so crooked even the rest of the crypto industry is like “yeah that guy’s a crook”¹⁸, listed TRUMP for trading on his crypto exchange named HTX (FKA “Huobi” but the first and most important rule of running a money laundry is that you must rename your company for apparently no reason¹⁹ every 2-3 years). HTX, for the record, is a company that has been banned from operating within the United States and is widely believed to have deep ties to the Chinese organized crime groups that dominate the global money laundering industry. Justin Sun is also the largest investor in Trump’s other crypto venture World Liberty Financial (put a pin in that information, we’ll need it later),

I’m sure all of these things are just coincidences.

Anyways the rest of the Chinese crypto exchanges²⁰ that are also banned from operating within the United States (and, much like HTX, are also widely believed to be involved in laundering money for fentanyl traffickers, terrorists, and rogue nuclear states²¹) rapidly jumped on board. Eventually even the “regulated” American exchanges like Coinbase decided to get in on the action.

Coinbase assures the world in its Terms of Service that its analysts carefully vet all the assets it allows so that only high quality tokens can be traded.

It’s worth mentioning that Coinbase only started to allow its customers to trade dubious scams like memecoins after it was sued by America’s Securities and Exchanges Commission (“SEC”) for massive amounts of securities fraud. That reality was the subject of a piece I published a month or so before the election wherein I said this:

The responses of the executives to the charges filed against these recently indicted crypto companies has almost uniformly been to give the government the middle finger while doubling down on profiting off of idiots trading dog and frog themed memecoins.

I stand by every word. In fact I would like to thank the token listing team at Coinbase for so effectively proving my point.

It’s also worth mentioning that Coinbase’s CEO Brian Armstrong was one of the largest overall donors to the 2024 election. The super PACs he and his broligarch buddies funded contributed to the election of both Donald Trump for president as well as something like 120 of the 538 members of Congress, all hand selected with the explicit goal of legalizing memecoin scams.

You may think I am joking and/or exaggerating about this. I assure you I am not.

Back to the memecoins. The stampede to buy TRUMP tokens got so intense that it started to break things in the crypto markets. The decentralized exchanges on Solana started creaking under the load. Orders started failing to execute. People sold so much of their other cryptocurrencies to raise cash to buy TRUMP that it caused a small market crash across all tokens not named after a once and future president. Records were shattered: TRUMP became the fastest memecoin to hit a billion dollar market cap²² and hours later became the fastest memecoin to hit a $10 billion market cap, eventually becoming the largest memecoin to ever exist²³ as well as the 15th largest cryptocurrency of any kind by market cap. More TRUMP was traded “on chain” than any token in Solana history²⁴. Pretty soon the market cap of TRUMP made it equivalent to the 143rd most valuable company in the United States, “worth”²⁵ more than all of America’s major defense contractors, food producers, and makers of things like housing and cars²⁶.

And so there was much rejoicing…

…until a woman showed up and crashed the sausage party.

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APRÈS MELANIA, LE DELUGE

“You can buy MELANIA now” hits a bit different if you’ve ever had the misfortune of encountering one of the weekly “Melania Mondays” threads on right wing message boards where hordes of pro-Trump incels spend all day salivating over pictures of Melania Trump in her underwear.

MELANIA was released a little less than 24 hours after TRUMP. Now while some of the bros were slightly put off by the idea of The First Crypto President starting his reign by launching a shitcoin scam (the “bitcoin maxis” in particular really hated it - more on that later), plenty of the rest were extremely stoked about TRUMP. “OMFG our prez luvz crypto lfg 🚀🚀🚀🌕🌕🌕!!!” was a typical sentiment expressed in the strange creole of emoji, gibberish, and avarice that the bros use to communicate with each other. Unfortunately, however, they were not stoked about MELANIA. In fact when the MELANIA launch announcement tweet appeared on The Social Media Wastes there was an incredibly drastic change of sentiment from “OMFG our prez luvz crypto lfg 🚀🚀🚀🌕🌕🌕!!!” to something more akin to “OMFG the president’s family is a bunch of scam artists who are using us for exit liquidity run for your live!!! (sic) 💣💣☠️☠️☠️” . This car crash of a vibe shift immediately caused the price of TRUMP to fall catastrophically by more than 50% within minutes.

Melania cost Donald half his net worth and she didn’t even need to ask for a divorce.

This gave rise to some great memes, especially among the bitcoiners (usually referred to as “bitcoin maxis”) who are (this may surprise you) not fans of “crypto” which they view as the provenance of unenlightened lesser life forms who don’t yet understand things like “Austrian economics” and “scarcity”²⁷. In fact they view “crypto” - and especially things like memecoins - as deeply damaging to the future bitcoin based utopia they plan to leave to their children.

The “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” refers to Senator Cynthia Lummis’s plan to transfer roughly one quarter of America’s military budget directly into the hands of people who own bitcoin. Don’t laugh - this is a very real thing for which legislation has already been drafted.

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THE SPOILS OF MEME WAR

Amidst the carnage some intrepid blockchain researchers started to look into just how much Real Money™️ Trump insiders had managed to pull out of the TRUMP launch. It turned out to be… a lot more than I personally would have thought possible.

What’s a half billion dollars between friends?

Now it’s possible that some of that $500 million was just “internal reallocation” (doubtful) but either way we can be sure they made a fuck ton of money appear out of nowhere by turning Trump’s brand into a memecoin and selling it to idiots addicted to social media memes involving dogs and/or frogs. Probably hundreds of millions of dollars at a minimum as of the time of Conor’s tweet²⁸, possibly pushing a billion dollars at this point.

It also turned out that not only had the Trump team seemingly managed to make hundreds of millions of dollars appear out of thin air by selling TRUMP tokens, insiders also seemed to control the decentralized marketplaces where TRUMP had started trading before all the Chinese organized crime exchanges started letting their users (ahem: “non-American users”) trade it. While it’s unclear if Trump insiders controlled all such marketplaces they definitely controlled most of the biggest ones. It’s annoying grunt work to figure out exactly how much they made in fees so instead I will just say that last time Conor checked the on chain data²⁹ the sum total in fees earned across all the decentralized markets for TRUMP was $58 million, up there around what you would pay for one of the biggest and most expensive apartments in one of the most expensive cities in the world.

Of course that kind of chump change won’t get you more than a few hundred Ferraris but thankfully at this point, based on the incredibly high volume of TRUMP trading going on in the days following that initial assessment, insiders have probably earned well over $100 million in fees on TRUMP trades. Put it together with the hundreds of millions of dollars they were able to extract from selling their initial allotment of TRUMP and it’s a pretty impressive take for 10 minutes of work creating a memecoin and sending a tweet.

Of course then there’s the possibly uncomfortable question of “where did all this money come from?” Because someone had to actually buy up all those TRUMP tokens, right?

“China China China.” - Donald Trump

Now that doesn’t mean that all of the hundreds of millions the Trump team was able to pocket came from people with Chinese or Singaporean passports. And it definitely doesn’t mean that the $500 million flowing through sketchy Asian crypto exchanges into Trump insiders’ pockets was actually just a way for someone (*cough* TikTok³⁰ *cough*) to pay a massive bribe in broad daylight to convince Trump that banning large Chinese social media platforms from the American market was a bad idea³¹. It does, however, mean that the businesses through which all those hundreds of millions of dollars passed on their way to Trump insiders’ pockets were run by people with Chinese or Singaporean passports operating out of a country somewhere on the Eastern half of the Eurasian continent. [UPDATE] Protos pointed out that the hourly trading volumes for TRUMP suggest that it is actually Chinese traders and not just international traders trading on Chinese exchanges driving the TRUMP market.

Bringing back American jobs amirite?

But not all the money came from China. Plenty of it came from the sad souls who have gathered together on the OfficialTrumpCoin subreddit to spin various conspiracy theories to explain how they lost all their money on a high quality investment like TRUMP.

Sadder souls are hard to find.

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THE BARRON

Donald and Melania Trump have a son named Barron. Barron apparently loves crypto - in fact a lot of people seem to think the TRUMP and/or MELANIA memecoins were his and Eric’s doing though the jury is still out on who was responsible for this particular hurricane of fraud - so yep, BARRON also happened. Or at least the team tried to make BARRON happen but, much like “fetch” before it, BARRON didn’t really happen. The Trump insiders in charge of the BARRON launch only managed to scam their fans for more money than most Americans make in a few years on it, packing it in pretty quickly after the token was launched. Barely worth getting into but it’s here for posterity.

They literally could not help themselves.

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THE GRIFT NEVER ENDS

Just gonna put a link here to let you know that that the pastor who spoke at the Trump inauguration launched his own memecoin within hours of his speaking engagement at the Capitol.

He managed to invoke both Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. while shilling a memecoin. I can think of few things either man would love more than HODLing his LORENZO token as it 🚀🌕 🚀🌕 🚀🌕.

This is just how the economy works now.

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NO REALLY, IT NEVER ENDS

TRUMP wasn’t even the only cryptocurrency token Trump sold to Chinese “investors” over this past weekend. It turns out our old friend Justin Sun (remember that pin from earlier?) was determined to increase his stake in Trump’s³² other crypto project World Liberty Financial by buying the rest of the available WLFI tokens…

But I’m tired boss. You’re going to have to read up on that on your own.

Whomst amongst us has not accepted a Chinese scam artist and money launderer recently indicted for securities fraud and market manipulation as a 50% owner in our crypto business?

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STUDENTS FOR TRUMP

In the middle of all this noise the chairman of Students For Trump, a man named Ryan Fournier, launched a pump and dump scam called TIKTOK. This was not Mr. Fournier’s first memecoin - his first memecoin was launched under the ticker MFC, which stood for “Money For Criminals” (stay classy, Ryan). He was able to pump and dump this TIKTOK token, successfully scamming a group of younger Trump supporters for most of a million dollars… and he tweeted all the way through it.

His first (now deleted) post was of his unrealized gains on his TIKTOK holdings showing his tokens had pumped up to $19 million in “on paper” gains:

This is called “the pump”…

Ryan followed this tweet by immediately dumping all the TIKTOK tokens he owned, which turned out to be half of all the TIKTOK tokens in existence. This action, known in the industry as a “rug pull”, sent the price of TIKTOK to basically zero more or less immediately:

…and this is called “the dump”.

Other MAGA bros who were “invested” in TIKTOK and as a result had lost all their money in the TIKTOK chicken game were big mad about this which was extremely amusing. (You should never feel bad for these people. What happened to them is exactly the thing they were hoping to do to someone else. Just laugh at them and move on with your day.) Either way Ryan Fournier decided to defend himself by claiming that he, too, had been scammed! And as a result he would be “staying away from crypto” for a while.

This, of course, is very much the standard playbook in the industry for a rug puller posting through the pain of being publicly called out for committing market manipulation crimes. One of his defensive tweets quickly became a certified banger for its utter ridiculousness.

“I literally sold because it was going down increasingly” has apparently become the new “mistakes were made in a wallet I controlled”, which was the previous holder of the “Most Preposterous Defense Offered By A Rug Puller” crown.

Just for fun I’ll mention that Ryan Fournier, outside of his crypto trading activities, is also a man who was recently arrested for allegedly pistol whipping his girlfriend. Such a charming lot this younger generation of Trumper bros are.

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FINAL THOUGHTS

1. There are Serious Finance People with Very Fancy Degrees who think the TRUMP token scam is good for the economy and society.

2. Those same Serious Finance People with Very Fancy Degrees now run the government of the United States of America. Specifically they have been placed in charge of the financial markets.

3. Despicable human beings like Preston Byrne, crypto lawyer extraordinaire, think there’s a lot of upside to their billing hours to memecoins and are rejoicing about the incredible amount of the federal judiciary’s time they will get to waste litigating this bullshit.

Good luck America.

(And if you liked reading this, do us a solid and share it with a friend or restack it.)

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POST SCRIPT

Since originally publishing this I’m starting to have a hunch that Donald Trump more or less “licensed” the memecoin to Justin Sun in exchange for Justin Sun’s $75 million “investment” in Trump’s O.G. crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. This is just a hunch but this is why I suspect that:

1. Trump has announced that he “doesn’t know much about” the TRUMP memecoin (take that for what it’s worth, which is not much).

2. All the cashing out through Bybit and other Chinese exchanges that Americans are not allowed to use. Overwhelming majority of TRUMP trading volume also on those exchanges.

3. TRUMP’s biggest trading hours are daytime hours in China. It was launched in the evening in the US but morning in China.

4. The launch of TRUMP was far too sophisticated and well executed to be done by the World Liberty Financial team or Eric / Barron. It feels like it was done by a skilled crypto prop trading shop, which is definitely a thing that exists in the Justin Sun operation.

5. Some “thought leaders” claim to have “confirmed” that MELANIA and TRUMP were launched by different teams (though bear in mind we are talking about Anthony Pompliano, the same “thought leader” who called Berkshire Hathaway a “boomer memecoin”).

6. The brazenness of the scam - e.g. the $1 million insider trading bet in the first minute of launch - is exactly the kind of thing that Justin Sun’s team does all the time that have given him literally the worst rep of any major player in the cryptoverse (which is impressive, in a way).

7. The $75 million “investment” from Justin Sun in World Liberty Financial could be a “licensing fee” of some kind.

8. A quid pro quo was publicly announced on Twitter by Justin Sun concerning a swap of World Liberty Financial’s WLFI token in exchange for SUNDOG, a memecoin that exists on Justin Sun’s Tron blockchain and was launched by his competitor to the major Solana memecoin generators (it’s called Sunpump, if you really must know).

9. I’ve been watching Justin Sun scam everything and everyone in sight for a few years now and this just kinda feels like a Justin Sun scam.

Food for thought.

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POST SCRIPT 2 (ELECTRIC BOOGALOO)

Financial firms are filing for ETFs to make sure good citizens are able to invest their retirement savings in TRUMP.

Good luck America. You’re really gonna need it.

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1. If that’s already confusing to you just think about it like a bank account for euros or dollars except instead of Real Money™️ your account balance is in something called FartCoin .

2. There are many blockchains. Bitcoin is just the first and most famous one.

3. Probably a virtual campfire in the video game you met the other degens in. Degens don’t get out of the house much but they do play a lot of Call Of Duty.

4. FarCoin is real, by the way. The current market cap is around $1.5 billion; roughly the price of a squadron of F-35 fighter jets.

5. It costs a little bit of “gas” to write any data to a blockchain - both to create tokens as well as send tokens - but this is not important to understand right now. The important thing to know is that it costs almost nothing and can be done in about two minutes due to the rise of memecoin factory services like pump.fun (do not click the link if you have epilepsy or just generally react poorly to flashing lights). The last number I saw estimated that around 50,000 new memecoins are generated on Solana every day.

6. Tehcnically “on chain” but feel free to envision them as poker chips or glass beads or pennies; whatever makes it easy to visualize.

7. They really believe this by the way. The theory is that if there are only 21 million bitcoins then no one will be able to borrow bitcoins and if you can’t borrow bitcoins you can’t pay for wars. I swear to god that’s really the theory.

8. It’s hard to convince people that they will hold their FartCoin til the day they die whereupon their FartCoin holdings will allow their children to enjoy the benefits of generational wealth because, well, it’s called FartCoin. Not that they don’t try.

9. "We’re all going to make it” which is crypto bro for “I’m trying to get rich off of you idiots.”

10. And might have been sent as a gift to some attendees but this whole story is far too stupid for me to confirm that.

11. The charges were later dropped for very unclear reasons. Nexo was banned from the United States n 2022. And that’s all I’m going to say about Nexo because I don’t want to get shot.

12. Probably more accurately stated as “stole from idiots”.

13. There’s a lot more to it that I’m glossing over here but “these can’t be investment contracts because they are not contracts” argument is core to Coinbase’s defense against the SEC.

14. “Rocket emoji moon emoji” is crypto bro dialect for “the price is going to go way up very soon.”

15. Thre’s a lot of caveats to these numbers but I’ll let Molly White explain them.

16. Usually when big accounts like Trump’s announce a scammy memecoin it’s because they’ve been hacked. Big accounts getting hacked and shilling memecoins happens pretty much constantly on The Social Media Wastes.

17. I’m far too lzay and this story is far too stupid to bother checking but if you want to check the data is available on solscan.com.

18. I keep typing out this description of Justin Sun because some people don’t know who he is but let me stress that it would be extremely difficult to overstate how bad this man’s reputation is among his fellow crypto bros which is really impressive in a way.

19. There’s actually a very good reason. Renaming your company helps with the Google search result history as well as makes it time consuming for law enforcement to cross reference bank records. Remember - money laundering isn’t about completely hiding your tracks, it’s about making your tracks incredibly annoying to follow.

20. More specifically the crypto exchanges that listed TRUMP first are not necessarily all fully Chinese (they are at least mostly Chinese though there are outposts throughout Asia outside the mainland) but they are all part of the Tether cartel which is of course deeply connected to Trump’s transition team chairman and future Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. There’s a lot more on that situation you can read here.

21. Binance, the largest of these exchanges and as of right now the biggest marketplace that offers its user the ability to trade TRUMP tokens, was hit with the largest money laundering fine in human history in 2023 for exactly these crimes

22. Market cap = price of token * number of tokens. If TRUMP is “worth” $1 and there are one million TRUMP tokens in the world then the market cap is $1 million but importantly see footnote 25.

23. Second biggest if you count Dogecoin as a memecoin which I personally no longer do because I know too much about Dogecoin’s legitimate use cases involving the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Core.

24. Possibly in the history of blockchain but a) I’m too lazy to check and b) explaining what I mean by “traded on chain” would be a lot of work.

25. There are many caveats to these numbers which is to say they’re kind of imaginary (and not as in i, as in “they are made up numbers”). Unlike, say, Ford Motor Company which, if it was priced at around a $10 billion market cap by the stock market could probably be sold for somewhere in the vicinity of $10 billion (often more), a memecoin with a market cap of $10 billion would have an extremely hard time realizing more than $1 billion for its “investors” due to liquidity issues. If this isn’t something you understand I recommend reading Molly White’s piece on the topic.

26. Except Tesla, which despite making considerably fewer cars than the rest of the world’s automakers is worth more than all of them put together. Apparently this is because Tesla is owned by Elon Musk, who promises us that some day soon he will catch up to his competitors who already make the kind of cars that drives themselves that Elon has been promising to release in “in about 2 years” for around 12 years now.

27. Truth be told there is an uneasy truce between the sceptics and the bitcoin maxis on the battlefields of The Coinerian Jihad. Some of the most effective anti-crypto shitposters are bitcoin maxis. I can only hope one day my brothers and sisters in arms will see the error of their ways before some unforeseen event drives us apart.

28. I relied on Conor’s data for this post because a) he’s one of the few blockchain analysts who I basically trust to not fuck things up and b) I don’t know how to work with Solana (and I don’t want to learn if I can possibly avoid it) so give him a follow at @jconorgrogan if you’re into that kind of thing.

29. Unlike trades in places like Coinbase the trades that happen on decentralized exhchanges along with the fees that were paid are publicly visible.

30. While I wouldn’t rule anything out some data I dug up after this was published points pretty clear to a bribe being paid to Trump by Justin Sun, possibly in the hopes that Trump would dismiss the charges filed against Sun by the SEC for market manipulation and securities fraud.

31. If you put on your tinfoil hat though… it kinda looks like TikTok just paid Trump a massive bribe by buying up his memecoin in exchange for getting the ban lifted. It looks kind of a lot like that, actually.

32. Technically World Liberty Financial is not actually Trump’s. Much like a Trump Hotel it is branded with his name and he receives 60% of any money “invested”. It’s run by two of the worst people on the planet… but everyone refers to it as “Trump’s crypto business”. Especially people who want to “invest” in the same tokens they think the President of the United States is “investing” in.