Have you bought Donald Trump's meme coin yet, $TRUMP? Trump launched a digital coin ahead of his inauguration. It has been valued as high as USD75 but is now hovering around USD26. It has a market cap of USD5B  – you must be missing out if you haven't bought it yet. Lots of other people have, 700,000 of them! It's the world's 25th most valuable cryptocoin.

What can you do with a Trump coin? Buy groceries? Sorry, no. However you can buy Trump products at GetTrumpWatches.com, GetTrumpFragrances.com and GetTrumpSneakers.com You cannot yet buy the Trump-endorsed Bible, but I'm sure that will change.

Trump has been criticised for launching a meme coin while saying he doesn't know much about cryptocurrency. However, since when did Trump have to know about something to pontificate on the subject? Or make money from it? Trump has been vocal about supporting cryptocurrency, despite his ignorance, and signed an Executive Order to set up a working group which will explore changes in cryptocurrency regulation (this is draining the swamp?). His Executive Order follows on from his 2024 promise to Bitcoin fans that he would make the US the "crypto capital of the world". There has been media criticism of Trump given his conflict of interest in launching a cryptocurrency coin from his position as the President in which he can influence its value. It has been suggested $TRUMP might undermine the dignity of the Presidential role. [Hollow laughter]

Meme coins are something I knew little about till I started writing this blog. Meme coins are cryptocurrency with a title originating from an internet meme or some other humourous characteristic. Cryptocurrency is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority to uphold or maintain it. Consequently any cryptocurrency, including meme coins, is risky – they have no value other than what  buyers and sellers ascribe to them. However, you could say the same about gold. Or artworks. However, it's a lot harder to do a 'rug pull' on a physical object – an all too common feature of meme coins and cryptocurrency in general. A rug pull is when coins are issued, the price rises fast, the creators sell their coins, take the funds raised and abandon the project leaving everyone else with worthless digital 'assets'. Supposedly 99% of investors lose money by investing in meme coins!

If you were going to invest in the industry, you might be better off buying shares in the platforms on which people buy and sell cryptocurrency e.g. Binance [I am not making any serious investment recommendations here!]. In the gold rushes, the store keepers and publicans made much more reliable money than the gold miners. Coingecko tracks top crypto exchanges – the 215 they track had a total trading volume of $134 billion in the last 24 hours and the exchanges scoop revenue off every trade. While meme coins seem like a joke and the 'meme coin' is often used dismissively,  the explosion of meme coins and  the amount of money invested in them (estimated at USD123 billion January 2025) suggest their social currency is not to be dismissed.

Anyone can create a meme coin about anything. First Lady Melania Trump has got into it. However, $MELANIA only has a value of USD700 million, nowhere near as good as $TRUMP; $MELANIA's price rapidly slumped from USD13 to USD2.70 after it was launched. There's also FARTCOIN with a market cap of USD1 billion and SHITCOIN with a market cap of USD252 million.

The first meme coin is generally considered to be DOGECOIN, (pronounced Dohjcoin) a cryptocurrency created in 2013 as a joke by a couple of software engineers, making fun of the wild speculation in cryptocurrencies at the time. Dogecoin rose in prominence when  Elon Musk pushed it on Twitter in 2021 then temporarily changed the Twitter app logo to a Doge logo in 2023. A lawsuit against Musk, accusing him of defrauding investors through hyping Dogecoin, was dismissed in 2024. Dogecoin can be traded against fiat currencies and other cryptocurrencies,  can be traded for physical items on Reddit and Twitter, and is used in Internet-based tipping systems on social media. DOGECOIN makes $TRUMP look really small – it's market cap is around USD55 billion.