Over the weekend incoming US President Donald Trump launched a cryptocoin, unsurprisingly called $TRUMP.
Announcing the release on his self-owned platform Truth Social, Trump’s post partially read: “Join my very special Trump Community. GET YOUR $TRUMP NOW.”
The post even ended with “Have Fun!” Trump’s younger male relatives (and himself) also took to Twitter to help juice excitement.
If ‘have fun’ isn’t one big dogwhistle winking at the speculative and volatile nature of meme coins, I’m not sure what is.
Regular readers of mine will know I fail to find cryptocurrency a serious asset, and that caution of mine is borne from the notoriously shaky crypto market.
It’s not like I’m being irrational. Take a look at the following chart for $TRUMP – it rapidly lost about half its value overnight, which appears to be triggered by one ‘rug pull’ style event.
I’d go into the ethics of all this, but there’s already been a lot of yammering written about this already and I reckon anybody interested in the trading of crypto doesn’t care.
I can’t also help but think of the way the product launch signed off: “Have Fun!”
Clearly, someone is having fun. Probably CIC Digital which co-holds 80% of $TRUMP and is owned by … you can probably guess. (It’s the Trump Organisation.)
There’s a lot you could make of all this, most of it predictable and boring.
What I do think is interesting is that $TRUMP could very well become a way of tracking public sentiment around Donald Trump – especially young men, those most likely buying and trading crypto, a notoriously hard to snag demographic because they don’t do surveys anymore.
(Alternatively, $TRUMP could be rigged in the other direction to sway sentiment itself. But I’ll spare the readers conspiracy-style thought on a Monday.)
My indicator theory backed by DJT
It wouldn’t be the first time a Donald Trump backed investment asset became more interesting as a sentiment indicator.
Let’s touch back on Truth Social.
Truth Social came not long before Trump Media & Technology Group Corp (NASDAQ:DJT) launched on Wall Street effectively via reverse listing in March of 2024.
It surged at first, but then later became viewed more as an indicator. Esepcially because the fundamentals of the actual company were terrible – it was a NASDAQ-listed meme stock, much like $TRUMP (don’t forget to “Have Fun.”)
However, in the lead-up to the 2024 American Election, DJT became widely accepted as a measurement of Trump’s election chances.
Clearly that’s a very broad (and oversimplified) way of looking at things, but the broad rise and fall in prices week by week was widely accepted to coincide with general opinion on the former President (excluding zealots on either side of the spectrum.)
And that’s exactly where I see $TRUMP going.
Given the obvious sheer force of will Trump can exert on Silicon Valley, it’s possible we could see relationships between $TRUMP and the Megacap 7 stocks emerge – or the VIX, or who know what else.
But when a President launches a cryptocoin, it’s more than just a cryptocoin. What, exactly, we don’t know yet. First time in history.
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