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One thing to note about Argentine President Javier Milei’s disastrous memecoin launch is that nothing about it was that unprecedented.
Every viral memecoin tends to pump before quickly losing value. So-called snipers have long been known to buy up new tokens before the broader public gets involved. Celebrities and “key opinion leaders” often engage with crypto on pay-to-play terms. Hell, two other presidents launched memecoins this past month.
When Melania Trump’s token pumped and dumped, the world moved on. Crypto doesn’t seem so willing to forgive and forget this time around. Maybe that’s because of how brazen the whole thing was.
LIBRA raced above $4 billion in market cap before dropping under $200 million in a matter of hours — a pump and dump far more drastic than, say, the MELANIA coin. After the fact, popular crypto figures spoke openly about trading on insider information. Barstool Sports CEO Dave Portnoy was allegedly refunded the $5 million he put into LIBRA, a privilege not afforded to most traders who lost money.
And unlike the majority of celebrity memecoin launches, this one had real-world fallout attached. Most surprisingly, it was announced that Ben Chow, CEO of Jupiter-linked DeFi platform Meteora, chose to resign — although Chow and Jupiter’s pseudonymous CEO meow both maintain that he did nothing tangibly wrong apart from showing a “lack of judgement.” Meow said Jupiter would be hiring the tech law firm Fenwick & West to investigate what happened.
Milei faces a lawsuit, Argentina’s stock market fell 5% after the opening bell yesterday, and SOL is down nearly 20% since Friday. KOLs started issuing mea culpas.
Crypto’s Twitterati is also very mad, and some are insistent that Solana needs to get back to focusing on constructive use cases like DePIN. It all feels a bit performative in the same way that investors and venture capitalists raced to explain why they never trusted Sam Bankman-Fried only after FTX went belly-up. I expect Kelsier Ventures CEO Hayden Davis — a LIBRA and MELANIA kingmaker who is doing a bizarre amount of media for someone accused of impropriety — to face some sort of legal action following all this collective ire.
But while lawyers will certainly rack up billable hours as a result of LIBRA, I doubt memecoin trading will take much of a hit. I asked Sphere CEO Arnold Lee whether he thinks the LIBRA fallout hints toward crypto finally drawing some sort of line on memecoins.
“An elephant never forgets, but crypto is not an elephant,” Lee said.
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