Meme coins swagger down the same cul-de-sac of obsolescence as NFTs (and comics)

No lessons learned from decades of media format wars

Photo © 2025 rc.xyz NFT gallery

Up up up and awayyyyyyy!

They tell me the new Superman film is good fun. I suspect this has more to do with it featuring a Superdog, just like in the 1960s animated series, and subsequently featured in MAD magazine piss-takes every now and again.

The dog’s name is Krypto. Surely he has his own blockchain token.

Which ought to be an inevitably clunky lead-in to make snarky comments about cryptocurrencies. But actually I suspect we’re reaching an interesting interlude in the crypto farce. Sorry, I meant to type “fad” but now that I have typed “farce” I think “farce” is the more apt word.

The rollercoaster ride that is financial crapto is all-too-familiar to you, my faithful reader. You know that crapto is a pyramid scheme. You are quite likely to own some crapto yourself – probably Bitcoin or Ethereum – but only a little and largely out of curiosity and personal entertainment. You don’t take it seriously: you’ve checked out the wiring under the board and, to mix metaphors, you’ve seen through the smoke and mirrors.

Mainstream crapto tokens go up up and and awayyyyy, then down diddly-down-down, then up and then down, and so on. That’s what makes them funny. If you didn’t enjoy the rollercoaster ride of crapto, you’d have invested in an empty shoebox instead, put a tenner in it and hid it under your bed.

Yet something significant, something divergent, is happening in crapto; perhaps you’ve noticed. The best way to get your head around it is to look at Donald Trump.

Oh yes, the great flag-waving Man In Orange himself. Hmm, flag waving… that reminds me… Didn’t I have a photo somewhere of a flag-waving Donald Trump?

Here we go again. Shall we use this photo as a running joke? [photo © Mme D]

If you track Trump’s crapto investments, which unlike his tax returns are easy to check out for yourself if you are a crapto investor yourself, you will notice two things.

First, a Trump-linked portfolio in the relatively sane and stable World Liberty Financial (WLFI) platform enjoyed a boost in value over the first six months of 2025 from $73m to $178m. Most of the surge came in the second quarter.

Second, Trump’s other investments in various meme-hyped shitcoins that only very stupid people invest in are on a permanent death-spiral. His overall crapto portfolio actually lost 78% of its value over the same six-month period. You may be familiar with the kind of shitcoins I’m talking about: retardo-currencies such as TROG and, er, TRUMP.