The president-elect’s and his wife’s meme coins undermine US market credibility, executives have said
Cryptocurrency industry figures have rebuked President-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania after the couple launched their own highly volatile meme coins over the weekend, Bloomberg reported Monday. The executives fear the new offerings could undermine global confidence in the digital asset sector.
On Friday, just days before his inauguration, Trump launched his $TRUMP coin. The token skyrocketed from $10 to $72 within hours before going down to $64. Two days later, Melania Trump introduced another meme coin dubbed $MELANIA which rapidly gained market value. However, the $MELANIA rally led to the $TRUMP decline, with prices dropping from over $75 to the low $40s.
The market frenzy raised the eyebrows of many veteran crypto investors. “The launches are now clearly a blight that we will have to work to put behind us as builders,” Rob Hadick, a general partner at Dragonfly Capital venture company, told Bloomberg. “The memecoins cost the US, the presidency and his family a lot of credibility,” said Gabor Gurbacs, director of digital-asset strategy at investment provider VanEck, while urging Trump to “fire his crypto advisors, from top to bottom and replace [them] with people who know what they are doing.”
Meme coins like $TRUMP, $MELANIA, and DOGE are known for their extreme price volatility and lack of intrinsic value, making them risky investments. Unlike stablecoins, which are pegged to assets such as the US dollar, meme coins often rely on social media hype.
While Trump once called cryptocurrency a “scam,” he has apparently reversed this stance, vowing to turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet” last year. While the incoming president has come under criticism for what many see as a frivolous approach to cryptocurrency, no US law explicitly prohibits a sitting or incoming president from launching his own digital asset.
