Summary
Donald Trump’s meme cryptocurrency, $Trump, surged to a $14 billion market cap after launch but fell by over 50% after Melania Trump introduced her own token, $Melania, diverting investor interest.
$Trump partially recovered to $64 while $Melania reached a $13 billion valuation.
The tokens, marketed by Trump-controlled companies, sparked debate over their speculative nature, market volatility, and potential conflicts of interest.
Trump’s pro-crypto stance and promised deregulation have boosted digital currencies, though critics question the ethics of profiting from political office.
It should be noted that many new tokens, NFTs, etc, will openly advertise that they are pump and dumps. They will literally recruit people to buy in under the pretense that they are going to win big as part of the dump, only for them to discover that they are actually going to be the bag holders.
Before crypto they used to just do regular pyramid schemes.
MLMs have been around for a long time. Pretty much any woman I graduated high school with has sold Mary Kay, Herbalife, Young Living… and it’s 100% the same kind of scam.
I think the legal loophole there is they actually have a product, which makes it legal (though still a scam.)
I was referring to the online scams they used to refer to as things like HYIP (high yield investment program) or whatever. Which were straight up ponzi schemes.
PayPal (who was kind of the only game in town at that point) started banning a bunch of these as they just got complaints from everyone left holding the bag.
Then crypto came along and now even the president gets to run open scams. Yay.