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Political finance (PoliFi) meme coins from TRUMP to TREMP are deep in the red, but the woman running the show at the latter, who goes by the handle B, is still having fun.
Over the last few weeks, a plethora of politician-themed meme coins have been minted on Solana and all have some resemblance to the Spoderman meme – a poorly drawn version of Spiderman on MS Paint that pays homage to Dolan, a bastardized version of Donald Duck with an attitude problem – complete with misspelled names.
The PoliFi cohort is a riff on the original meme but with politicians. Doland Tremp, Jeo Boden, Elizabeth Whoren—the gang’s all here.
TREMP was minted on Feb.28 at an initial price of a few fractions of a penny, DEXTool data shows. It has since run to highs of 63 cents and sits at 22 cents on Wednesday, giving the tokens a market capitalization of $22 million. Nearly 20,000 individuals hold the tokens.
Its original creator abandoned the project shortly after release, selling their holdings when the project was in its infancy. Community members, such as B and others, took over the reins shortly after – leading to what’s popularly called a “community takeover” in crypto circles.
B, a woman who is based in the UK and works in tech marketing, sees the battle for token value between these coins as a blockchain election.
“I think that having a crypto election at the same time as a real-life election is something that’s never really been done before in the crypto space,” she said.
Although B is a Trump supporter, the project isn’t about partisan convictions but about memes, community, and having fun. B believes Trump has the support of the crypto community because of opposition to the Democrats’ tax policy.
“We want to rally all the communities behind us and just make funny memes and videos,” she said, emphasizing that they are working on a long-term road map. I’ve taken time off my real-life job to focus on TREMP.”
TREMP isn’t the only Trump-themed PoliFi token. There’s MAGA on Ethereum, which has a much larger market cap and is held in the former President’s official wallet.
But there isn’t a rivalry, B says, as they view themselves as a counterpart to Solana.
Meme coins like TREMP and BODEN have been minted on Solana, and the price of SOL has shot up 60% over the last month, according to CoinDesk Indices data.
There’s another side to this as well. Memecoins are such a hit that they have started to strain the Solana network, with users complaining about congestion causing transactions to fail.
3fn, B’s partner in the TREMP project, explains that these meme tokens use Solana because of its low transaction fees, fast speeds, and community. Ethereum won’t work because of its high fees – something that was the genesis for Solana and its competitors in the first place.
“I think Solana is going to onboard a bunch of people just because it’s accessible,” he said, pointing out that the gas fees on Ethereum are too high at $100 a swap.
Some in the legacy financial media space approach this burgeoning PoliFi sector with scorn. B and 3fn say that these critics are missing the point. Yes, it seems silly and absurd, but PoliFi coins now have a market cap of almost $220 million, according to CoinGecko data.
And this is crypto, so it’s perfectly reasonable to create a category trading on the names of politicians and have it worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko doesn’t quite understand it, telling CoinDesk during an interview for The Protocol podcast that it’s a product of people being “terminally online and having nothing better to do.”
That’s directionally accurate, according to B.
“We make funny memes, and we just want to make people laugh,” B said. “We haven’t come out to make any enemies.”
Edited by Parikshit Mishra.
