President Donald Trump's general popularity may be reaching new heights, but the rise in approval is not reflected in the price of his or First Lady Melania Trump's meme coins, which have lost 81% and 92% respectively from their highs just before his inauguration.
Official Trump was trading at $72 and now sits at $13, while Official Melania reached $13.69 on January 20 and now sits at 77 cents.
The Trump coin still has a market cap of more than $3 billion, but it had more than $14 billion at its peak.
Cryptocurrency seemed to rally ahead of the White House Crypto Summit on Friday, with Bitcoin rising 5% to over $91,000 on Thursday.
The boost didn't last long, however.
Thursday afternoon, Trump signed an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in an attempt to “make America the crypto capital of the world.”
Bitcoin immediately dropped to around $84,000 on the news, eventually coming back up to around $87,000.
The reason crypto markets were not too thrilled with the order is because the reserve is being created with crypto already owned by the federal government, seized during drug busts and other criminal activities.
“The government will not acquire additional assets for the Stockpile beyond those obtained through forfeiture proceedings,” crypto czar David Sacks stated.
Many crypto investors thought taxpayer money might be used to create the reserve and that it might be as large as 1 million bitcoin, but that is not happening.
A strategic reserve is meant to provide more stability to the asset, and bitcoin has been extremely volatile since its beginning.
The order also created a US Digital Asset Stockpile, “consisting of digital assets other than Bitcoin forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings.”
With more than 37 million digital tokens in existence, there seems to be no end in sight to the exploding growth of this medium.
