top of page
Search

What the TRUMP Token Means for Crypto

Writer's picture: Guy OvadiaGuy Ovadia

If investing is a game of blackjack, crypto is like playing with a bunch of jokers shuffled into the deck. I know how cliche “expect the unexpected” sounds, but Trump launching an eponymous Solana meme coin was not on my 2025 bingo card. We may be living on the wackiest timeline, but that’s no excuse not to at least try to be armchair analysts of our reality.


Trump, who was explicitly “not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies” during his first term as president (yes, that’s him verbatim; I have the receipt) has taken a sharp U-turn since leaving office. 


Trump only became openly crypto-friendly the year after his return to private life when he launched a 45,000-piece NFT collection on Ethereum — a second series of 47,000 was released a few months later. A couple more NFT collections followed, including a Bitcoin Ordinals series. 


Trump rapidly warmed up to blockchain assets and quickly shifted from benign NFT projects to his first coin: World Liberty Financial (WLFI). This ambitious DeFi project was his first foray into real crypto, but it didn’t stir any buzz compared to the TRUMP coin on Solana.


Truth be told, launching a meme coin was a stroke of genius, playing directly into the scolding hot web3 zeitgeist. EVM-based DeFi projects are so 2021 — that ship has sailed. The WLFI token can be generously characterized as a soft launch, but it doesn’t hold a candle to TRUMP in terms of impact.


And let’s talk numbers for a second. TRUMP has leveled out at around $60-$70 the day before the inauguration, placing it at a $13.1 billion market cap. But the number everyone is howling about is its FDV, or fully diluted value. This figure, which factors in the 80% of the supply that’s set to vest over the next three years, stands at a whopping $65 billion.


Why care? Firstly, TRUMP was launched on the day of Gary Gensler’s resignation, a symbolic “fuck you” and double middle finger to the outgoing anti-crypto leadership of the SEC. Secondly, TRUMP launch was timed well past market hours on the last business day of the outgoing administration.


Finally, the obvious: TRUMP was silently launched, an absolute rarity in crypto these days. All this, in the context of Donald Trump’s exponentially growing cultural capital, sent an eleven-out-of-ten shockwave through the crypto community.


The launch of TRUMP and the subsequent SOL rally to a new all-time high has sent Ethereum into an existential crisis. Solana was often touted as the Ethereum killer — the chain that would unseat Ethereum to become the go-to smart contract ecosystem. While Solana inched closer, the TRUMP launch has brought SOL the closest it has ever been to killing ETH.


With that, everyone is looking to what Ethereum co-founder and intellectual heavybrain Vitaly Buterin has to say. Vitalik, as he’s affectionately called, has never been much of a culture warrior or crypto populist despite his overall alignment with the decentralized ethos. 


Vitalik acknowledges that Ethereum’s leadership is undergoing internal turmoil. The non-profit Ethereum Foundation (EF) — which serves as the blockchain’s epistemic leadership, funding body, and advocacy network — is undergoing a leadership overhaul to better align with its goals.


The day after the TRUMP launch, Vitalik directly addressed the goals of the EF’s restructuring on X. But more notably, he stated “explicit non-goals” as well, among them was pivoting from a “feminized wef soyboy mentality to bronze age mindset”


The other non-goals he mentions — political lobbying, being a highly centralized ‘main character,’ or an arena for vested interests — may be more serious-sounding on the surface, but they are less important than his comment on the cultural direction of Ethereum.




Crypto is ultimately a war over narratives, and Bitcoin owes its dominance to its decisive victories in early battles. Different cryptocurrencies have duked it out for the hearts and minds of ideologues and financial degenerates alike, and Ethereum delivered early on with a product that was tangible and practical — all but birthing the concept we collectively call “DeFi.”  


Ethereum created a new economy that functioned, barely, but improved over time. It innovated and had an active development community that was dedicated to a vision broader than “digital money” which was already spoken for with Bitcoin. But this wasn’t enough, especially in recent years.


Many ETH holders have become disillusioned with Ethereum and Vitalik, in particular. Many joke about how their entire net worth is in the hands of this skinny unicorn-pajama-wearing geek — how ETH’s dips consistently correlate with whether or not he has a girlfriend. But underneath this nervous laughter is serious concern. Will their bet on ETH pay off? Will Ethereum keep up with the times?


ETH’s performance has been disappointing compared to Bitcoin, the larger crypto market, and, namely, SOL. Solana has made a name for itself as the degen’s blockchain, catering to a growing subset of retail crypto enthusiasts who are purely in it for their stroke of luck: a token that blasts to the moon, bags of cash, and a lambo in their driveway.


This sentiment was always part of crypto, but the joke, which was once a fable of a bygone era chronicling those who got in early, has returned with the so-called memecoin supercycle.The trend has become sharing screenshots of your Phantom portfolio, touting the speed of the trading bot that makes automated bets on your behalf on meme coins whose names you can’t say in school. This came to a fever pitch with the Hawk Tuah coin.


Hawk Tuah is an interesting case study of a high-profile meme coin’s failure. It originates from a girl who became a viral meme for her passionate discussion on the merits of providing fellatio to your betrothed. She milked her 15 minutes in every way possible: talk shows, a podcast, and launching a crypto project that was only lucrative for its creators by stealing from those who feared missing out on the next big token launch.


This perfectly encapsulates the market sentiment: a combination of FOMO, memes, and dumb money looking to make a quick buck in the most retarded way possible. And in all of this, Solana is simply the enabler. A blockchain that serves as the canvas on which crypto grifters smear their shit and pass it off as art.


Now, I know which logical direction this argument is headed — and I would NEVER disparage our esteemed president-elect who took a bullet for our country. But let’s entertain the idea that Donald Trump isn’t morally infallible. Did he take advantage of his supporters for an opportunity to make an incredible eleven-figure profit? Or are all the people who bought TRUMP willing participants in his scheme to sell a coin with as much intrinsic value as the dirt stuck to my shoes?


I digress, so let’s steer this back to my point: the TRUMP launch was great for Solana as an ecosystem and SOL as a coin. This success tells us one key thing: SOL is on the verge of dominating the altcoin narrative and becoming what an active community of crypto laymen sees as exactly what they came here for in the first place. 


That is, a casino disguised as a stock market, wearing the word “investment” like a fleshy mask.


Vitalik’s take on this is that the degenerate investor meme culture symbolically championing its victory over the woke left by creating wealth out of thin air is really just that — air. It’s not adding anything to crypto and it only confirms the suspicions of Gary Gensler’s ilk that crypto is a parody of itself. 


But this is no longer a suspicion, but a proven fact. The esteemed intellectual scholars of Austrian economics and Bitcoin maximalist proponents of hard money are taking their final breath of fresh air as they retreat into their refuge alongside the few remaining cryptocurrency projects that take themselves seriously. They’re already plotting their next offensive to retake ground lost to a competing ideology that stands for nothing and wants everything.


The question is, when will they return? Or perhaps the question should be “If?”


7 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


bottom of page