TRUMP.FUN – Former President Donald Trump’s speech just a couple weeks ago at the Bitcoin Nashville conference now seems like a distant memory. Not only has he been overtaken by Vice President Kamala Harris as the frontrunner in this year’s U.S. presidential election – at least in the eyes of punters on the prediction-betting site Polymarket – but his name and family members are now regularly getting dragged into conversations about memecoins. It started last week when one of his sons, Eric Trump, tweeted that he has “fallen in love with Crypto / DeFi. Stay tuned for a big announcement,” as related by CoinDesk’s Krisztian Sandor. Then on Thursday, a newly launched cryptocurrency on Solana (SOL) called Restore the Republic, or RTR, rumored to be the official token of Donald Trump, began trading, shooting to a $155 million market capitalization within hours after the launch. Eric Trump then warned users of “fake tokens” and said that the “only official Trump project has not been announced.” RTR tumbled 95%. His brother, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted that while he loves “how much the crypto community is embracing Trump,” traders should “beware of fake tokens claiming to be part of the Trump project.” Then there was the former president’s Spaces session on Monday with X owner Elon Musk, during which the pair notably didn’t even mention Bitcoin or crypto. According to The Block, the omission sent prices tumbling for the tokens with names like MAGA Hat and Doland Tremp. The crypto news site Decrypt reported that some 10,000 tokens were launched during the Spaces on the meme coin launchpad Pump.fun, where the $2 issuance fee was completely eliminated earlier this week – making it that much easier and cheaper to launch a token. Based on one account posted on X, after Trump uttered the phrase “rough people” about five times in a row, there were at least 10 distinct memecoins launched with the name “ROUGH PEOPLE.” Some memecoin traders complained that using Pump.fun was “not fun anymore” because there were “10,000 scams.” But for at least one commenter, watching the action felt almost like a news feed: “I don’t even need to watch the space when there’s pump fun.”
