Trumpcoin ends the NFT era as we knew it
Crypto grifts no longer need images—and it's killing the prices for once-mighty NFTs
Fists, meme coins: Trump loves to pump it all. Photo by Gage Skidmore, courtesy of Flickr via Creative Commons license
Amid Donald Trump’s attempt to once again flood the zone upon his return to the Oval Office, it’s tough to triangulate the importance of the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins. On the one hand, launching them looks so blatantly corrupt that even the free-market conservatives on the Wall Street Journal editorial board(!) say it “creates flashing-red political risks and ethical conflicts.” On the other hand, the amount of direct harm the coins will do to people pales in comparison to Trump’s immigration crackdown, his repeal of the barely established monthly caps on prescription drug prices, or many of the other retrograde executive orders already issued in his second term.
Yet $TRUMP and $MELANIA have a unique bearing on the state of crypto and NFTs, two forces that professionals in the art and collectibles markets have (begrudgingly) started thinking seriously about again. Mostly, the First Couple’s meme coins are a case study in how much more warped and alien the blockchain space has become since most gallerists, auction professionals, and art collectors abandoned it during the crypto winter of mid-2022 to mid-2023. And the worst casualty of the changes, surprisingly, may be the NFT market.
Trumpcoin’s magical mechanics
Let’s start with the supposed windfall that Trump, the man, enjoyed after the launch of $TRUMP, the meme coin. (I’m going to focus on his token because it’s much higher-priced than Melania’s and also, y’know, HE’S THE PRESIDENT.) Molly White, the journalist best known for her deeply researched and deeply crypto-skeptical site Web3 Is Going Just Great, recapped the mainstream journalistic coverage by noting that various august newspapers’ estimates of the coin’s so-called “fully diluted value fluctuated wildly, from somewhere around $20 billion to around $70 billion, depending on which paper you read and when they published.”
There’s a catch, though, she writes on her second site, Citation Needed: “That the numbers fluctuated by about $50 billion within the span of only hours or days perhaps should have been a sign to these reporters that the numbers aren’t real. Fully diluted valuation is an estimate so flawed that even publishing it should be considered journalistic malpractice.”
Although the complete explanation White unspools in her post is long and layered (and worth reading, if you care about how crypto works), the gist is that the fully diluted value of any cryptocurrency is the byproduct of several assumptions over a timeline too long and contingent for the present conditions to last. Those conditions include the price of a single Trumpcoin (which was already down 50% from its high when I wrote this sentence on January 23) and the number of willing buyers at that price; the assumptions include that Trump and his cronies won’t just up and change the terms of the offer sometime between now and the end of the three-year period over which the (supposed) full supply of 1 billion coins will be released. (Only 200 million went on the market initially, none of which—ostensibly—are owned by Trump or his affiliates.)
So, the fully diluted value of $TRUMP (or any other coin) is its price today, multiplied by the total number of that coin that is ever supposed to go on the market, regardless of how far out the runway for the release might go. As of my writing, the price had peaked at $72.62, according to the crypto- and NFT-tracking database Coingecko (where all of the other token and NFT datapoints in this post of mine come from, too). This meant that $TRUMP’s fully diluted value was, for one brief shining moment, $72.62bn. And since two corporate entities controlled by the Trump Organization own the (allegedly) non-circulating 80% of the meme coin’s supply, some reporters have relayed that its release ballooned Trump’s net worth by around $58bn.
But like “fully diluted value,” “net worth” is just a number on a spreadsheet—a “notional value,” to use White’s term. It’s sort of like building an excuse out of a patchwork of stuff that actually happened to you: it’s connected to real things, but the end product itself is only as real as you can convince someone else to treat it as being. Accepting fully diluted value as an actual pile of US dollars means indulging the same fallacy as saying, for example, that the founder of a major corporation who holds a big chunk of its stock “lost $500m” because of a momentary dip in their company’s share price. Sure, their net worth declined by $500m, but that’s not the same thing as the New York Stock Exchange debiting $500m from the founder’s offshore accounts.
The WSJ has handled the Trumpcoin mechanics the most responsibly of the major news outlets whose coverage of it I’ve read. In response to the question of whether Trump could actually pocket the billions created on paper by his meme coin’s launch, Vicky Ge Huang wrote for that paper: “In short, no. Trump’s meme-coin gains are unrealized profits that exist only on paper. If he were to flood the market with the remaining tokens, it is unlikely he would find enough buyers at the current price. As he unloaded his position, the price would very likely go down, as would the value of his holdings.”
There are other good reasons not to fall into the notional-value trap of either Trumpcoin specifically or meme coins generally. Most notable among them is wash trading, a scam in which the owner of a crypto asset fakes organic demand by “trading” that asset between different crypto wallets they control, or between their own wallet(s) and wallets controlled by accomplices, for amounts of crypto that never actually change hands—all in pursuit of convincing some sucker to put up real money to buy the asset at the artificially inflated price.
If you believe in the legitimacy of the market for a meme coin that was suddenly launched and is primarily owned by Trump, one of the most brazen crooks to ever walk the earth, I am afraid for what the world is waiting to do to you and your finances. Especially now, after…
The dawn of ‘sloptimism’
Even though the public is being led into wildly overrating Trump’s actual, immediate financial benefit from his meme coin, that doesn’t mean the launch of $TRUMP is unimportant. In fact, the illusion and misunderstanding are the reasons this whole boondoggle matters. Trumpcoin is the skeleton key to unlocking how much more naked the cons in the crypto space have become since the last time it was regularly merging into the lanes of art, luxury, and entertainment.
If you compare where we were in crypto three years ago to where we are today, the core difference is that very few, if any, of the pump-and-dump schemes underlying the market revolve around NFTs anymore. Instead, most, if not all, of them revolve around meme coins. Each trade consists of money being paid for a digital token, which is really just a unique alphanumeric code registered on a blockchain.
There is no visual or audio product involved, no underlying “asset” that could theoretically appreciate in value because it looks cute or sounds interesting or comes from an artist with a genuine following. The meme coin is just letters and numbers that add up to an online lottery ticket associated with a joke or a cult figure—and that the owner can maybe, possibly, if they time it just right, offload onto someone else for even more money before the crash that, crucially, everyone knows is coming from the start.
The artist and theorist Daniel Keller not only identified this trend early but also coined a term for it: sloptimism. The writer Sam Venis summarized the concept this way in a wider-ranging piece about $TRUMP’s political implications for Spike:
In an era when AI threatens to absorb the vast majority of corporate productivity, Keller argues, the locus of wealth creation has shifted from making real products that people need toward the production of attention as its own commodity. If, in 2010, post-internet artists were creating memes in the form of statues, and the NFT era was about tying together financial instruments with the creation of memes, the era of sloptimism is about a form of commerce where the transaction itself is the meme. Think: Hawk Tuah creating a meme coin, or the 12-year-old-boy who live-streamed his own meme-coin scam and made millions in the process. Sloptimism is the rise of the scam-as-performance-art, the complete elimination of corporate substance from the meme-art simulacra.
What’s remarkable is that this shift is actually visible in market data. It used to be that the average price of the most sought-after NFTs basically functioned as a proxy for the prices of the two core cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency for the Ethereum blockchain, which most NFTs are built on. But the prices of BTC and ETH haven’t even moved in step with each other for the past several months; the last time they were as far apart as they are today was four years ago, around the time Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days planted NFTs into the wider world’s consciousness by selling for $69.3m at Christie’s.1
This afternoon Bitcoin was trading at $105,560, within striking distance of the lifetime apex of more than $108,000 that it achieved just as Trump was about to be inaugurated.
Data and chart by Coingecko
ETH, in contrast, is up over the past three months but nowhere close to its historical summit of $4,815 in November 2021; it was trading at around $3,255 early this afternoon, around two-thirds of its all-time high.
Data and chart by Coingecko
I don’t want to oversell the significance of this decoupling, because ETH could surge over the next few weeks or months and make this recent stretch look like an anomaly, not an inflection point. Symbolically, though, the divergence aligns with sloptimism’s rise.
Ethereum is a blockchain designed to have multiple functionalities. Sure, you can buy and sell ETH, but the infrastructure underlying the currency can be used to build NFTs and decentralized apps—stuff that, in theory at least, has a use beyond finance. Bitcoin, in contrast, is purely transactional. Its only function is as a means of exchange or speculation. That’s it! And while ETH prices have been fine, BTC prices have never been higher. The symbol is as unsubtle as the cultural and political phenomenon it stands in for.
Left for dead
The mutations in the crypto ecosystem become even clearer if you dig into NFT prices. Since most NFTs are minted on the Ethereum blockchain and bought and sold in ETH, you might expect the prices and trading activity of the better-known NFT series to track relatively closely with the prices and trading activity of ETH itself.
But that’s not what’s been happening.
You can get a sense of the general trajectory if we bring back the lifetime chart for the price of ETH, which peaked in late 2021 but has gradually recovered over the past three years…
Data and chart by Coingecko
… and compare it to the lifetime chart for the floor price (the lowest price at which an NFT from the series is available) of Larva Labs’s Cryptopunks below. I’m choosing the punks because they were the original PFP (“profile pic”) series and one of the only NFT projects with a strong enough collector base and mythology to be offered as blue-chip art in the top auction houses’ marquee evening sales.
Data and chart by Coingecko
Are both ETH and the punks’ floor price up over the past quarter? Yep. Do their overall patterns have much resemblance beyond that? Nope. The Cryptopunks peaked around the fall of 2021, generally declined for around 2.5 years, and have barely begun to tick up again over the past six months or so. They’re not even halfway back to their apex price.
And do you know what the scary part is? Of all the longstanding and once-popular NFT projects I’ve checked up on this week, the Cryptopunks are one of the more resilient series.
To test my instinctive belief in Keller’s sloptimism theory, I dug into Coingecko and spreadsheeted out the recent trading and price action for 13 NFT series that were covered in the art-trade media between 2021 and 2023. Although it’s admittedly unscientific, this method reflects that those publications were only devoting editorial resources to NFTs that had achieved a certain level of breakout success—enough to give the projects at least a chance to stick around long term. (I know this because I was an editor at Artnet News during that time, either writing about some of these series myself or weighing in on what actually warranted being assigned to other writers.)
The 13 series in question were, in rough order of ubiquity: the Cryptopunks; the Bored Ape Yacht Club; the Chromie Squiggles; the one-off Everydays NFTs that Beeple minted in 2020; the Mutant Ape Yacht Club; the Bored Ape Kennel Club; Tyler Hobbs’s Fidenza project; the Autoglyphs (also by Larva Labs); the Meebits (ditto); the Pudgy Penguins; the Moonbirds (which put Jimmy Fallon under suspicion of violating FTC rules); the Cool Cats; and the Cryptoadz.
Evaluating their performance is a classic lesson in recency bias. If we narrow our view to just the past three months—a stretch spanning the final days of the 2024 presidential campaign until just after Trump’s inauguration (with the debut of $TRUMP included)—then it looks like the NFT market is rising along with the markets for BTC and ETH to varying degrees. Of the 13 series in my sample, all but one (Fidenza) had a higher floor price on January 22, 2025, than on October 22, 2024, according to Coingecko.
But the illusion shattered once I broadened the lens. You can see it in the chart below.
Chart by TGM
As of yesterday, the floor prices for 11 of the 13 series were down at least 66% from their lifetime peak in ETH, counting seven—including the once-mighty Bored Ape Yacht Club—that had plummeted at least 91%.2 The two outliers were Hobbs’s Fidenza works, which dropped around 25%, and the Pudgy Penguins, which had declined around 42%.3 The Cryptopunks earned the “more resilient” designation I gave them earlier by sliding only (“only”) around 69%.
Coingecko’s NFT data is imperfect, to be sure.4 But even if its results are wrong in some of the specifics, they’re too consistent across too many series to be wrong on the overall direction of the market.
In this sense, the 13 NFT series above—and, it’s fair to conjecture, NFTs in general—have become even more disconnected from the hottest parts of the crypto market than ETH itself. Maybe they’ll bounce back if the broader rally continues. Or maybe they’ll stay more or less left for dead as speculators pile into the transparent slop of meme coins.
Either way, I doubt that we’re going to see a new explosion of 10,000-unit NFT collections being launched anytime soon. What would be the point? Very few people were ever actually buying into them for the images anyway. Charitably, they were buying a chance to be a part of a community of shared values, or at least a little digital clubhouse. Less charitably—and more truthfully, in most cases—they were buying for the possibility of getting rich before they got destroyed.
Do you really need an NFT to try for any of those same outcomes in crypto in 2025? No, especially now that even the POTUS is inviting you to gamble on meme coins. The rallying point is the living, breathing person the token is named after. The “community” of like minds is already there. And almost everyone is worse off for it— even if they don’t realize it yet.
The ETH-to-BTC ratio went down to 0.031 today, even lower than it was when this linked article was published.
For wonks only: Since the dollar value of ETH itself fluctuates, an NFT series' peak average price in ETH is not necessarily its peak average price in USD. Given that NFTs are typically priced and bought in ETH, I calculated off of the peak average price in ETH, not the peak average price in USD.
Incidentally, Fidenza and Pudgy Penguins were also the only two series whose average price in ETH peaked in 2024, per Coingecko; all the others hit their respective high between October 2021 and May 2023.
For instance, there are at least five series—Autoglyphs, Bored Ape Yacht Club, Everydays, Chromie Squiggles, and Meebits—that began trading farther back than Coingecko’s database tracks. But if the blind spots impact my results at all, they’re actually favorable to the projects’ current prices. If NFTs from these series were sold for lower prices before Coingecko’s data began, it would have no effect on the peak price shown in Coingecko’s sample. If NFTs from these series sold for higher prices before Coingecko’s data began, then the percentage drop they’ve experienced in the time since would be even more extreme than what I found.