When the biggest personal brand in the world—Donald Trump—launches a memecoin scam, you know we’ve reached a tipping point. This is it. The altseason, the ICO hype, the endless grift of “the next big thing” in crypto—it’s all played out.
It’s not that altcoins suddenly stop existing. It’s that the scam cycle has hit its natural peak. There’s no more fake innovation left to pretend these things are useful. Every major crypto trend of the past decade has followed the same pattern: a lot of hype, a few early winners, and a long trail of bagholders.
So let’s take a moment to reflect.
A History of Crypto Hype Cycles
- ICOs (2017-2018): Raised billions, mostly for projects that never delivered anything. Some founders got rich in Bitcoin, the rest disappeared. Ethereum is still running from this era, pretending it’s not a security or really worth something.
- NFTs (2021): A giant marketing campaign for digital collectibles. Do you really need a blockchain for art, tweets, or profile pictures? No. The biggest winners were influencers who dumped on their audience. Ah, Trump also published a few of these.
- Tokenized Gaming Assets: Sounds cool—“own your sword, take it between games!”—but the reality? Games don’t work like that. Fortnite already has crossovers, skins, and digital assets. They don’t need a blockchain to make that happen. Game devs control their own ecosystems, and no one’s waiting for Solana, Ethereum, or any other tokenized “solution” to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.
- DeFi Ponzinomics: Staking, yield farming, “passive income” from vaporware. Everything built on leverage and speculation, waiting for new suckers to keep the game going. You are the yield in DeFi.
And now, after all of this, Trump drops a memecoin.
Trumpcoin is the Final Stage of the Scam Cycle
Think about it. Donald Trump, the ultimate brand marketer, is now running a pump-and-dump. The man who has sold everything from steaks to fake universities is now selling a digital token with his face on it.
This isn’t about politics. It’s about the end of the altcoin era. When even Trump is in on the grift, you know there’s nothing new left to sell.
- No innovation.
- No real adoption.
- Just the same recycled Ponzi tactics, but with bigger names now.
So What’s Next?
Maybe we’ve finally exhausted the hype. Perhaps people are finally waking up to the fact that Bitcoin is not the same as crypto. Bitcoin isn’t a token, a game asset, or a celebrity cash grab. It’s money.
Or maybe I’m just too optimistic. In Dutch, we’d say “goedgelovig”—believing too much in the good. In English, you might call it gullible.
But there’s also another possibility:
Maybe this is just the beginning of the next grift.
Potentially we’re not done with shitcoins, but just entering the celebrity rug-pull era—where the next wave of tokens isn’t launched by anonymous developers, but by household names who don’t care what happens to their followers.
Either way, Bitcoin doesn’t care.
It doesn’t need a new narrative every cycle. It doesn’t need hype to function. And it doesn’t need a Trump-branded knockoff to stay relevant. Bitcoin is here because it works. Everything else is noise.