(Bloomberg) -- Donald Trump and his wife Melania’s new memecoins ignited criticism from crypto executives who were expecting the digital-asset sector to be treated seriously by the Republican’s incoming US administration.
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The president-elect unveiled the “Trump” token on Friday and his wife Melania launched her “Melania” effort on Sunday. The Trump memecoin’s market value hit $15 billion at one point but then briefly slid below $8 billion as Melania’s token took some of the spotlight, figures from aggregator CoinMarketCap show.
The memecoin sector, stuffed with joke tokens like Dogecoin offering little intrinsic value and high volatility, is divisive as it feeds criticism of the nascent industry as too frivolous and risky for mainstream investors. Memecoins rely on social media tailwinds that can disappear as quickly as they arise.
The weekend launches are “now clearly a blight that we will have to work to put behind us as builders,” said Rob Hadick, general partner at crypto-focused venture-capital company Dragonfly Capital.
Inauguration Countdown
The sector was instead keen to focus on Trump’s expected steps to foster wider industry growth following his inauguration later Monday, including an anticipated executive order designating crypto a national priority.
In a post on X, Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor and former chief technology officer at US crypto exchange Coinbase Global Inc., said memecoins are a zero-sum “lottery” where the “price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.”
In a separate post, SkyBridge Capital LLC founder Anthony Scaramucci pointed out the launch of Melania coin caused Trump coin to sink.
Scaramucci was briefly Trump’s director of communications in 2017 during the latter’s first presidency before being fired and becoming a vocal critic.
More ‘Consequences’
Meanwhile Gabor Gurbacs, director of digital-asset strategy at investment provider VanEck until last year and founder of PointsVille, said the memecoins “cost the US, the presidency and his family a lot of credibility.”
Gurbacs said in an X post that the consequences of the launches “haven’t even started” and called on Trump to fire his crypto advisers.
Representatives for Trump didn’t return requests for comment about the criticism of the memecoins from some digital-asset executives.