The road to the US election is paved with political memecoins — now down 90%

Political memecoins — PolitiFi — had a real moment during the first half of the year. That’s since been put on hold.

The five most prominent tokens, MAGA (TRUMP), MAGA Hat (MAGA), Doland Tremp (TREMP), Jeo Boden (BODEN) and Kamala Horris (KAMA), altogether peaked at over $1.25 billion market cap at the start of June.

Now they’re worth under $170 million, a near-90% collapse. 

The remnants of ConstitutionDAO, which lost an auction of a rare first-print of the US constitution to Citadel CEO Ken Griffin in late 2021, now make up almost two-thirds of the entire PolitiFi market, per CoinGecko. Although, it’s arguable whether it should be really ranked alongside political parody memecoins and such.

PolitiFi didn’t even exist this time last year. This election season has been its big moment, with the largest Trump memecoin launching only in August 2023 — just as bitcoin was warming up for its major rally.

Read more: Memecoin taxes and NFT royalties are paying off for Trump

Bitcoin’s bull run between October and March really gave cover for PolitiFi. The chart above plots the market caps of the big-five political memecoins (faded areas in the back) against the performance of bitcoin (orange line), ether (purple line) and the S&P 500 (blue line). 

You can see that PolitiFi has mostly mirrored ETH price action over that period — the purple line follows the shape of PolitiFi’s market cap — while bitcoin is holding up better, for now at least.

Is PolitiFi over? Probably not. But considering the Kamala Harris -themed memecoins aren’t doing any better than the Trump ones is somewhat telling.

A simple reason this particular flavor of memecoin is down could be that there’s no new fresh wave of interested holders entering their markets, whose liquidity might’ve outweighed sellers’ and boost prices.

This chart zooms into the market cap of the largest Trump memecoin — as shown by the orange line — and maps it against changes in the number of new holders.

Notice that major points in Trump’s narrative directly coincide with huge influxes of new holders. 

Thousands of addresses added MAGA (TRUMP) to their bags around the Supreme Court’s election ballot ruling, Trump’s “hush money” guilty verdict and his assassination attempt in July. 

No such luck since, with only 424 new holders following the debate against Harris on Tuesday, as of Friday morning. Polymarket odds for a Trump win in November has meanwhile fallen from 52% to 49%.

All told, out of the 80,190 addresses holding MAGA (TRUMP), about 30% of them (24,300) bought in after the token set an all-time high of $17.51 in early June. It’s currently trading at $2.25 after losing nine-tenths of its value. 

And sure, 80% drawdowns are one of the oldest traditions in crypto . But if there was a time for a huge Trump headline to revive PolitiFi, then now would be it. 

A modified version of this article first appeared in the daily Empire newsletter. Subscribe here so you don’t miss tomorrow’s edition.

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