President Donald Trump launched a memecoin days before being inaugurated, earning him more money in 24 hours than he had in the previous 78 years of his life.

Trump's wife Melania also got in on the fun with her own crypto launch, uninspiringly dubbed "Melania," on Sunday — the launch of which, dramatically, seems to have caused her husband's memecoin to crash.

Put simply, this is the president of the United States and the First Lady employing the same playbook as Haliey "Hawk Tuah" Welch, who launched an alleged crypto pump and dump scheme last month before vanishing.

The charade sets the stage for an even more unregulated crypto market — likely giving scammers unprecedented carte blanche to exploit the space in ways they've been held back during the Biden and first Trump administrations (Trump used to be an outspoken foe of crypto before flip-flopping.)

And interestingly, as crypto expert Molly White pointed out, that possibility has actual crypto execs worried instead of elated. As it turns out, the Trump coins weren't the full-throated crypto rallying cry they'd hoped for; instead, it was a resounding endorsement of the kind of scams that have plagued the industry for the better part of a decade now, undercutting the legitimacy of enterprises trying to build sustainable business models in the sector.

"Trump onboarded normies to crypto today, sure," tweeted ZeroLend cofounder and exec Gafoor Khan. "But for what? A memecoin pump?"

"I joined crypto because I genuinely saw a potential major impact on the financial system," wrote another crypto engineer. "Here we are, president of the United States Of America launching his own memecoin. Genuinely questioning whether I want to be involved in any of this much longer."

"How the hell do we explain the last few days in crypto to our children?" the same engineer added in a followup.

"It's a gambling token," Skybridge Capital founder — and Trump's former White House director of communications — Anthony Scaramucci told Yahoo Finance. "It's a memecoin."

"Our society is always going to have gambling," he added. "Our society is always going to have smoking and alcohol. But he's the leader of our country, and he does represent something to the rest of these countries, at least the institution of the presidency once did. So I don't like it."

The memecoins "cost the US, the presidency and his family a lot of credibility," investment provider VanEck director of digital-asset strategy Gabor Gurbacs told Bloomberg.

Bitcoin has gone up during the leadup to Trump's second term, with the crypto soaring to new record highs of well over $100,000, but it hasn't exactly exploded in value either, signaling some hesitation in the markets.

A probably concern: whether the president's cash grab approach to crypto will do more damage to the industry's reputation long term.

Many executives saw the president and Melania Trump's latest cash grabs as a major step back, "clearly a blight that we will have to work to put behind us as builders," as crypto venture Dragonfly Capital general partner Rob Hadick told Bloomberg.

We're likely in for a wild couple of months, as the Trump administration opens the floodgates. The president is expected to issue an executive order making cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin a "national priority."

Meanwhile, the two Trump crypto tokens have unsurprisingly crashed from their initial highs, dropping by more than 50 percent since their peak this weekend — and leaving clueless backers out to dry.

One thing's for sure: the crypto industry is forced to do some serious soul-searching as Trump continues to undermine its already tenuous legitimacy.

"Feel bad for anyone trying to build anything serious rn," one Twitter-formerly-X user wrote. "President just making a complete mockery of this industry."

"Fighting another Biden admin prolly would have been better longterm," they added.

More on crypto: The Vast Majority of Trump's Net Worth Is Now in His Meme Coin


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