Summary
Donald Trump’s meme cryptocurrency, $Trump, surged to a $14 billion market cap after launch but fell by over 50% after Melania Trump introduced her own token, $Melania, diverting investor interest.
$Trump partially recovered to $64 while $Melania reached a $13 billion valuation.
The tokens, marketed by Trump-controlled companies, sparked debate over their speculative nature, market volatility, and potential conflicts of interest.
Trump’s pro-crypto stance and promised deregulation have boosted digital currencies, though critics question the ethics of profiting from political office.
What even goes into making/marketing these coins?
Solana has a HOWTO on making a new token here:
https://solana.com/developers/guides/getstarted/how-to-create-a-token
It requires some knowledge, but not really that much. Also note there are further FAQs in the bottom on other topics.
Anyone can create any arbitrary token. At the start they are all worthless. But there are ways to provide liquidity to exchanges and then use that liquidity to open a market. There is a Medium post here outlining one way to do it:
https://medium.com/@solanatokennet/how-to-create-and-launch-a-meme-coin-in-less-than-0-35-sol-6d265dba9b15
From there, the marketing part of it is like any other pump and dump scheme. Associate it with some pop culture figure, create a fan base willing to pay for anything associated with it, milk them to get the price up, then dump all the coins you have been keeping for yourself directly into the market, absorbing all the demand and leaving everyone with worthless numbers on the Solana Blockchain.
(It is important to note that it is only this easy for tokens that are implemented on existing Blockchains, using Smart Contracts. The Blockchains themselves are not so easy to establish. Anyone can start their own Blockchain project but they have to get other people involved in their project to get any momentum. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, even Dogecoin all have their own Blockchains whose history can’t simply be copied just because their code can be used to start up a new one.)
It should be noted that many new tokens, NFTs, etc, will openly advertise that they are pump and dumps. They will literally recruit people to buy in under the pretense that they are going to win big as part of the dump, only for them to discover that they are actually going to be the bag holders.
Before crypto they used to just do regular pyramid schemes.
MLMs have been around for a long time. Pretty much any woman I graduated high school with has sold Mary Kay, Herbalife, Young Living… and it’s 100% the same kind of scam.
I think the legal loophole there is they actually have a product, which makes it legal (though still a scam.)
I was referring to the online scams they used to refer to as things like HYIP (high yield investment program) or whatever. Which were straight up ponzi schemes.
PayPal (who was kind of the only game in town at that point) started banning a bunch of these as they just got complaints from everyone left holding the bag.
Then crypto came along and now even the president gets to run open scams. Yay.