Financial Insights That Matter
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump launched meme coins of themselves just before the inauguration, which have made them billions — at least on paper, for now — and have garnered mixed reactions in the crypto industry.
Meme coins are a particular form of cryptocurrency very different from, say, bitcoin or stablecoin.
Ever since the Trumps launched their own meme coins, Bina Ramamurthy, a professor of computer science at the University of Buffalo, said that everyone she knows has been coming up to her asking “What is happening? What is this?”
“A meme coin is like your collector’s baseball card or Pokemon card or something like that,” she explained. “So it’s a digital version of a collector’s item.”
You might buy a meme coin because you think it could end up being valuable but mostly “these are items that you buy because you want to participate in the moment, rather than buying them to grow or store your wealth over the long-term,” said Ryan Rasmussen, head of research at the crypto asset manager Bitwise.
Meme coins are highly volatile, and Rasmussen said they’re not something to buy as an investment the way you might with bitcoin.
“It’s really important for people to only play with meme coins with money that they’re willing to lose,” he said.
When the Trumps launched their own coins just before the inauguration, Rasmussen added that some in the crypto industry thought “this was more taking advantage of the technology to enrich themselves, and taking advantage, perhaps, of those that don’t understand the difference between meme coins and bitcoins.”
At the same time, the president having his own coin has also brought a lot of attention to crypto and gotten a lot of people to buy it for the first time, which he said are positives.
Ari Redbord, global head of policy at the blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, said he thinks, ultimately, this will be good for the industry.
But “there are some serious players within the crypto ecosystem that would just rather see a focus on a strategic bitcoin reserve, or legal clarity, or ensuring that regulators are supportive of innovation in the space,” he said — rather than launching meme coins.
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