A couple of days prior to taking oath as the US President, on the 20th January, 2025, Donald Trump launched his personalised digital currency. It didn’t take too long after that for the cryptocurrency’s value, called $TRUMP, to soar in value. In fact, by the time Trump’s oath-taking had taken place, his newest venture had secured a market capitalisation of around $9 bn.
Soon after her husband’s cryptocurrency came into existence, the American First Lady, Melania Trump, too, launched a digital currency of her, called $MELANIA.
Donald Trump’s changed stance towards cryptocurrency
In his first term, the 78-year-old was opposed to the idea of cryptocurrencies and all that they entailed. While running for his second term, Trump’s viewpoint towards these digital offerings was quite the opposite.
He’d promised to be more in favour of digital currencies and to ease the regulations around them. By committing to these, Trump leveraged support for his presidential bid from the who’s who of the crypto sector. These bigshots lobbied for him during his campaign days and were quite instrumental in changing the tide of the American elections in his favour.
In fact, Trump’s announcement about the $TRUMP coin came about during a party thrown for people involved in the crypto sector called, “Crypto Ball”.
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The four years of Joe Biden as the US President had meant that cryptocurrency was subject to severe regulatory restrictions. The country’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had filed litigations against several crypto trading organisations, including Coinbase. The then chairman of the SEC Gary Gensler was particularly antagonistic towards cryptocurrencies. He also didn’t hesitate to legally pursue any crypto entity whom he believed to be flouting the scope of legality in the fintech sector.
With these decisions of his, Gensler ran afoul of Trump who said that he would be relieving Gensler of his charge and replacing him with Paul Atkins. Eventually, Gensler resigned on the same date as Trump took charge of the Oval Office.
For now, though while Atkins awaits the competition of formalities to take over from Gensler, Mark Uyeda will be the acting chairman. Uyeda has already taken the initial steps towards realising Trump’s promises by setting up a “Crypto Task Force”. Hester Peirce, the SEC’s Commissioner will be handling the task force.
Regarding the Task Force’s operations, Peirce said, “We look forward to working hand-in-hand with the public to foster a regulatory environment that protects investors, facilitates capital formation, fosters market integrity, and supports innovation.”
The Task Force will collaborate with other governmental authorities alongside the cryptocurrency sector’s stakeholders to meet its outlined goals. As such, Peirce also noted, “This undertaking will take time, patience, and much hard work. It will succeed only if the Task Force has input from a wide range of investors, industry participants, academics, and other interested parties.”
Reactions to $TRUMP
None of these steps taken by the incoming American administration has, however, done much to stem the criticism towards the newest digital currency, $TRUMP. It’s also not helped his cause that his cryptocurrency is a memecoin.
Memecoins are so-called because they’ve no functionality. They’re created based on ongoing cultural trends in the world, or, in other words, memes. One of the most popular memecoin is Dogecoin. Thus, it can also be said memecoins are parodies of actual cryptocurrencies that have specific uses like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Fans are the primary reason for increase in memecoins’ value. As such, among the varied array of cryptocurrencies, there’s significant amount of risk associated with memecoins.
On account of these reasons, the crypto market experts and insiders feel Trump didn’t err on the side of caution by opting for a memecoin as his personal crypto offering.
“Now, on the cusp of getting some liberalization of crypto regulations in this country, the main thing people are thinking about crypto is, ‘Oh, it’s just a casino for these meme coins.’ It does the opposite of validating us, it makes it look completely unserious,” said Nic Carter, a partner at Crypto Island Ventures, a company engaged in cryptocurrency investment.
In addition to his position in the organisation, Carter’s also a Trump backer. This, too, adds more weight to him – and potentially, several others like him – not being fans of $TRUMP.
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