$TRUMP and the Attention Economy
The US president released a memecoin right before his inauguration, let's unpack this
TLDR:
Trump released his own memecoin $TRUMP that hit $20bn FDV in under 6 hours and peaked at over $75bn FDV - the US president has his own memecoin.
The abundance of information online has made our attention scarce, which has consequently created the Attention Economy we live in.
Memecoins like $TRUMP have evolved in such a way that I believe they now represent tokenised attention, and give birth to the “Attention Market”.
Crypto is an incredibly powerful technology that’s still in it’s early innings, undoubtedly we’ll see it create more and more unexpected markets.
Donald Trump launched his own memecoin just 3 days before becoming the sitting president of the United States of America.
Although the words above feel like the beginning of a fictional story in an alternate reality from a wacky Marvel film, they aren’t! It’s real and it happened. And it made me think a lot about the evolution of crypto and what might be happening here.
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$TRUMP
Donald Trump released his own memecoin $TRUMP on Friday 17th January, just 3 days before he took office as US president on Monday 20th January.
He did so by releasing a post on X and his own Truth Social accounts announcing the memecoin along with its website gettrumpmemes.com. At first people thought it might be a hack, but very quickly it became clear that it was the real deal!
At that same moment in time the Trump administration was running a “Crypto Ball” event to celebrate crypto with many of the biggest industry names like Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, Gemini’s Winklevoss Twins, and David Sacks the new “Crypto Czar” who’s been given a mandate to grow the crypto sector in the US.
The hiring of David Sacks to look over crypto, and throwing of the Crypto Ball were already important signals from the new Trump administration that they would change the government’s approach to crypto. Whereas the last administration and SEC under Gary Gensler continuously attacked the industry, this one would be different.
However, what absolutely nobody saw coming was that Trump would launch his own memecoin!
This news threw crypto-twitter into chaos, with people posting non-stop about it, and lots of liquidity from other crypto projects got sucked into this new coin! Huge amounts of people piled in huge amounts of money as they scrambled to “get in early”.
In 6 hours $TRUMP had already reached a $20bn FDV (fully diliuted value - which is essentially the true market-cap), and it peaked at over $75bn FDV in under 24 hours, basically making it one of the top 10 most valuable coins in the entire space!
In what can only be described as a surreal moment that felt like an alternative reality in a Marvel Film, the US president-elect launched his own memecoin right on the same day Gary Gensler left the SEC.
It’s entirely unprecedented for the president of the US to create their own memecoin!
And naturally a huge moment for crypto, since if the president can launch his own memecoin then pretty much anyone can launch whatever they want in crypto, right?
I spent the last few days thinking about all this, especially in the context of the evolution of memecoins this past couple of years, and I began to see something that I think is happening that I decided to unpack in this week’s post.
Note that I generally avoid politics in my posts, and in this case I’m choosing to entirely ignore the questionable legality and ethics of this for now - after all the project came with a very questionable ownership of 80% of the tokens by Trump and his team that will begin unlocking in 3 months time.
The Attention Economy
We all know that over the past decade social networks on the Internet have radically changed human behaviour. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter/X, and all the other dopamine feeding social networks have essentially rewired us to be constantly connected and bombarded by new information.
With this abundance of information, attention has become scarce.
And where there’s scarcity, economic fundamentals come into play. This phenomonem has created a growth in what we call the “attention economy”. Influencers who know how to keep attention on them are able to use their audience and attention to sell products and services, and therefore profit off of it.
In essence attention itself has become monetizable.
Over the past couple of years I’ve personally seen something very interesting happen at the intersection of crypto and the attention economy. Perhaps it’s been happening since the dawn of crypto but it’s become even more apparent with memecoins in the past few years.
Whereas traditional stock markets and real estate markets usually ground themselves mostly on fundamental analysis (ie. the fundamentals of a project), crypto’s always been driven far more by sentiment analysis (ie. how people feel about it) which is in fact a complaint Gary Gensler made just as he left the SEC.
Thanks to pump.fun and other token launchpads we’ve seen a rapid growth of memecoins. In fact there are hundreds of new tokens being launched every single minute on all different networks, Solana in particular being the most used network for memecoin activity.
Memecoin activity for the most part is very short-lived though. Except for a few mainstays like Dogecoin, the majority of memes last only a couple of days or at most weeks, before dying out.
When the squirrel “peanut” was tragically killed by the US government, it was all over the news and a memecoin called $PNUT was span up and went on to be worth over $2bn in market cap before crashing out to around $350m now.
Similarly, when a very rare pygmy hippo called MooDeng was born in a Thailand Zoo, a token called $MOODENG was created that saw massive gains and breached $700m market cap, only to have fallen back down to around $150m now.
The “trenches”, as degen crypto traders call it, are full of people trying to find the next thing that’ll pop off to make a quick buck, and ultimately it’s all based on attention. The new $TRUMP coin was just another incredibly obvious reminder of this, and ulitmately it’s made me realise that:
Memecoins have tokenised attention.
Tokenising Attention
When the first stock market was created by the Dutch in the early 1600s it must have been a crazy idea for you to own a chunk of company but not be a majority owner. However, it unlocked totally new capital markets and entirely changed the way people could invest, build wealth, and even think about money.
Crypto is the most powerful financial system humans have ever created, and is able to unlock capital markets in many ways not yet imanigable. I personally think we’re seeing the birth of a whole new type of market, fow now I’m calling it the “Attention Market”, although I’m sure we’ll come up with a better name for it.
This market has its own rules and most people won’t want to be involved since the fundamentals are so loose, and it’s easily gamed. But the potential for making money is also huge and so there’ll always be enough people willing to play it that it’ll keep growing and growing.
I genuinely think we’re seeing the beginning of the formation of something huge here.
When $TRUMP was launched it was clear right away to me that it would grow massively. Not because he was offering any sort of return for holders, in fact the website made it perfectly clear that people shouldn’t see it as an investment.
No. It was clear it would become huge because he was just about to come into office. Trump’s walked into the most powerful job of the most powerful country in the world for the second time, after a gruelling campaign against him.
Literally the entire world’s attention is on him right now.
So of course his very own memecoin would shoot up in price and overtake the great majority of other crypto’s that most people in the world don’t know anything about.
It’s important to note here that “Attention Market” (or whatever it’ll be called) is only one way in which crypto enables the financialisation of new markets that we’re not yet fully aware of.
The truth is most people haven’t really opened their eyes to just how huge and powerful of a technology crypto really is, and most will just look at $TRUMP’s coin as an attempt at grifting (which I’m not saying it isn’t), but there’s something much bigger at play here.
Balaji, one of the most respected voices in crypto, has previously spoken about what he calls the “DeFi matrix” where everything is going to be financialised and connected, and right now I really think we’re seeing that with attention being tokenised and traded along with all the other crypto-assets.
Stay Safe
Attention may be scarce, but it’s still a very fickle thing.
The rules of the Attention Market are not like other markets people are used to, it’s also why fundamental analysis doesn’t work and why people call it “mid-curving” when you try to apply fundamental analysis and miss the opportunities right in front of you.
If memecoins have shown anything it’s that they are quick to grow and quick to fade.
The attention market is therefore one of the easiest markets to make huge upside, but also one of the easiest to get burned fast. Not to mention that there’s a lot of grifters and rug-pulls.
Heck, as I said at the top, Trump’s project is 80% owned by the team, and they only have to wait 3 months before they can start dumping their gains onto unsuspecting buyers. Be careful not to be on the negative side of that trade.
Should Trump have launched his own coin? And followed it up with a $MELANIA coin for his wife immediately after? Thes are complex questions and it obviously all looks very dodgy, but that’s a whole separate conversation for another day.
The truth of the matter is that Trump has released a memecoin, and we’re now in a new age where the president of the most powerful country in the world has his own memecoin that will undoubtedly regularly fluctuate in price based on his perceived attention - so I imagine it’ll continue to be a top coin at least while he’s president.
And it’s also the biggest testament to the exciting times to come ahead within crypto with the new US administration and the massive evolution in finance that we’re currently going through. I honestly think this is as bullish a signal for crypto as you could possibly imagine.
Buckle up because 2025 and beyond is just going to get ever more wild!
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