Financial nihilism is breaking through the breaches - its a story of technocapital repackaging what was once transgressive and on the outside as new state policy. The memecoin is no longer a symbol of resistance against the wrongs and injustices of loaded markets heavily weighted in favor of elites. Nor is it decentralized, censorship resistance or dependent on a new type of monetary consciousness. Memecoins instead are the gateway drug to stablecoin dominance in public life and in turn a foundational plank for the establishment of the Crypto-Dollar.
We have seen trial runs of TRUMP before, celebrity coins making waves and sparking controversy. However, celebrity is fickle, transient and not enough to generate the myth-making capital for a mere token to endure beyond the initial moment of virality. Other household memecoins are built on abstractions and symbols, that have been through cultural Darwinian competition to reach the summit. Embodied celebrity alone is not enough to power and stay the dreaded inevitability of exit-capital decay. TRUMP plugs into the mimetic virality of memecoins and fuses it with state power - it is a political abstraction that will displace the absurdist abstractions of its predecessors. Trump is not a celebrity - he is a political myth occupying the most powerful office of our age.
The easy, Occam Razor's interpretation of events is that this marks the delirious and violently febrile peak in a relentless cycle of global meltup not just in crypto but across traditional finance markets. This is the point of no return, the catalyst for violent correction setting the conditions for a global credit event. That may well be the correct take on events, who really knows? However, there is an alternative to consider.
With $TRUMP, hyperfinancial speculation is now directly tapped into the political fortunes of Global American Empire more explicitly, without the mediation or rationalization of corporations, CEOs, stock market politics or trad-fi sensibilities. Consider this - his inauguration, his inevitable departure from office, his death, every scandal, every statement, every policy initiative, every geopolitical tussle is now intimately woven into the the destiny of a token willed into existence. It is the expansion of the speculative realm beyond internet culture, online cults and esoteric culture on the margins into meatspace itself. It is colonization of the meme of our physical space, based not on the frailty of mere celebrity but that of the Presidential Office. TRUMP is the attempted diffusion of Imperial interest by banking on the animal spirits of financial nihilism - the update patch to Weimar cultural politics.
The contemporary architecture of crypto at present is a firm public-private partnership with intelligence agencies examining and auditing transparent chains. On-boarding to crypto is still jealously guarded by traditional finance regulation, KYC and governments. The success of $TRUMP in the long run inaugurates SOL as the Imperial choice for GAE, Trump bestowed upon SOL the Emperor's favor. More unprecedented is the searing domination TRUMP achieved in terms of liquidity, holders (despite the lock-in by Trump insiders no doubt) and marketcap that was achieved just using DEXs without needing the big CEXs. Millions if not billions will be willing to enter the casino of Panoptic Technocapital mediated by Megacorp exchanges and on-ramps. Let us take a moment of silence to remember Satoshi.
In all respects, TRUMP is the Empire's answer to Eric Hughes - the fatal nail in the coffin to "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto". The godhead of the State has extinguished the cypherpunk spirit in less than two decades since Bitcoin first arrived. TRUMP is the very antithesis of Satoshi - anonymous, humble, cloaked in mystique, on the fringes, on the outside offering an alternative network of monetary consciousness to the dollar (well initially anyway). Cryptography has clearly not enabled secure anonymous money, it has given new life to animal spirits as all the tools of the cypherpunks are being actively captured and co-opted by the incumbent American financial elites. Cypherpunks write code but so do empires. ETFs, crypto-adjacent stock offerings, companies and retail products backed by Imperial military might and legislative frameworks will completely smother the original intent of crypto-anarchist politics.
Centralized bureaucracies because of an asymmetry of resources (chiefly information and data because of mega surveillance structures) are starting to outmaneuver organic networks and tribes. Indeed, nation-states are manufacturing (astroturfing) movements for the purposes of waging total cognitive warfare against its own adversaries.
$TRUMP raises fundamental questions about the viability of online organic networks and tribes to raid and wage guerrilla war against nation-state actors. It is becoming apparent that the State can co-opt, manufacture and synthesize swarms at will by entering into cyberspace.
An additional factor to consider is the impending MAGA Wars (HB1ndians was only the first chapter - biometric surveillance packaged as checks on mass immigration, private-public stablecoins sold as rescuing the dollar and "fixing the debt" and mRNA acceleration plus more to come) - as the Trump coalition violently breaks and splinters off internally. Surely, libertarians, the MAGA working class, ethnonativists will not be jumping for joy as Trump starts to favor and indulge the speculative impulses of Surveillance Valley elites. How much longer will this merry band stay together?
$TRUMP could be the peak, the starting of the end of a cycle - or it could inaugurate the birth of something new altogether, a new horror for all those who were once beholden to the promise of the Cypherpunk Manifesto.
And truly God knows best