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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
Nic Carter was biting into a cookie at the Crypto Ball, the digital asset industry’s star-studded celebration of a president who had assured them he would support the nascent sector, when he learned that Donald Trump was launching a cryptocurrency named after himself. Suddenly, the party atmosphere took on a sour note.“I was pretty dismayed by it,” Carter, a Trump voter and general partner at Castle Island Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in crypto start-ups, said in a phone interview Friday. “It cheapens his embrace of the crypto industry.”Trump’s new coin, $TRUMP, is an example of what insiders call a meme coin — a digital token traded largely to capitalize on jokes or online enthusiasm rather than as a practical financial asset. It had a market capitalization of $5.8 billion late Friday, a sizable worth for a week-old project.But Carter fears the presidential crypto coin makes Trump’s promises to ease regulation on the sector appear self-serving and creates conflicts of interest. “It makes it look like quid pro quo,” he said.The crypto community, which broadly backed Trump’s campaign, is roiled by mixed emotions now that he has taken office.There’s elation, fueled by the executive order Trump signed Thursday promising to ease regulation on the industry and commanding government officials to consider how to establish a national stockpile of cryptocurrency.There’s also disappointment from some who, like Carter, think his launch of the $TRUMP meme coin — followed days later by $MELANIA, named for his wife — amplifies one of the sillier and sometimes scammier aspects of the scandal-associated industry.Meme coins are generally much more volatile than widely held crypto tokens such as bitcoin, and more vulnerable to hacks and fraud. Many are based on online jokes, like $PNUT, named for Peanut the Squirrel, an Instagram-famous pet euthanized by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation last year.Crypto tokens minted from memes can also create significant wealth, especially if the creators hold on to sizable stakes of a token that takes off. A digital firm affiliated with the Trump Organization controls 80 percent of the supply of $TRUMP tokens
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