President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump They launched meme coins for themselves Just before opening Made them billions — at least on paper, for now — and has gotten a mixed reaction in the crypto industry.
Mime coins are a specific form of cryptocurrency that is very different from, say, Bitcoin or StableCoin.
Since the Trumps launched their Meme Coins, Bina Ramamurthy, a computer science professor at the University at Buffalo, said everyone she knows has been coming up to her asking, “What’s going on? What’s this?”
“A meme coin is like your baseball card or a Pokemon card or something like that,” she explained. “So it’s a digital version of a collector’s item.”
You might buy a meme coin because you think it might be valuable, but mostly “these are items you buy because you want to participate in the moment, rather than buying them to grow your wealth over the long term,” said Ryan Rasmussen, head of research at crypto asset manager Bitwise.
Meme coins are very volatile, and Rasmussen said they are not something to buy as an investment the way you might be with Bitcoin.
“It’s really important that people only play with Meme Coins with money they’re willing to lose,” he said.
When Trumps launched its own coins just before the opening, Rasmussen added that some in the crypto industry believed “this They were more taking advantage of technology to enrich themselvesAnd benefit, perhaps, for those who do not understand the difference between Meme coins and Bitcoins. “
At the same time, the president who had the coin also brought a lot of attention to Crypto and got a lot of people to buy it for the first time, which he said were positives.
Ari Redbord, global head of policy at Blockchain Intelligence Company TRM Labs, said he believes, ultimately, this will be good for the industry.
But “there are some serious players in the crypto ecosystem who would prefer to see a focus on Bitcoin’s strategic sanctuary, legal clarity, or ensuring that regulators support innovation in the space.”
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