This week saw steep losses for meme coins amid a broader crypto market slowdown. With Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most Layer-1 tokens in retreat, losses for altcoins like Shiba Inu, Pepe, Bonk, Brett, Mog Coin, Gigachad reached from 5% to above 20% for the seven day period ending Sept. 5. But MAGA posted 27% gains while Flockerz raised $150,000 in presale.
Almost no other meme coin posted gains for the week. Wif inched up 0.44%. Gamestop was up 8% —also showing strength among the altweb’s Reddit Wall Street bets crowd amid the market turmoil. But almost every other meme coin with any appreciable market cap was in full retreat for the seven day window. That shows conviction among the MAGA crowd for their economy.
Now setting aside political ideations or feelings for the space of this article, we’re interested here in what this all means for your money.
With a $42 million market cap, Maga Hat (MAGA) is a popular Trump-inspired meme coin. One reason the token surged this week on top of a 30-day winning streak is Donald Trump’s increasing lead over Kamala Harris on the Ethereum Polymarket betting platform.
Harris may be pulling ahead of Trump on the old landline telephone poll surveys by college poly-sci department interns and alphabet soup television broadcasters, but on Polymarket, Trump is favored to win by 53% to 46%, with an $800 million betting pool going here in early September. That’s giving the Maga Hat token crowd some verve in this bear market.
According to one report by CoinGecko published on Aug. 27, political-themed tokens or “PolitiFi” coins surged 782% this year, outperforming even the overall meme coin market.
That’s pretty remarkable and shows how influential this U.S. political campaign season is on meme culture and the Web3 finance sector.
Imagine ordering and selling a thousand bumper stickers or political buttons for a profit, all at once, spending hardly any time at all on it, all from your computer, and all without sitting in a lawn chair all day in the burning heat or freezing cold waiting for all those things to move off your wagon, plus a booth fee that makes your Ethereum mint fee look super cute.
We Internet-era denizens just don’t know how good we have it. Another coin that has this eagle’s eye is Flockerz, because it recently raised $150,000 right out the gate in its presale event from a small pool of backers. While the blockchain obscures many identities, this has all the looks of previous meme coin jaw droppers that had whale support at liftoff time.
What I like about Flockerz is that it has combined appeal to the PolitiFi crowd and the meme coin market. It isn’t overly political or partisan, so it has a wider pool of potential community spirit to tap into on crypto x and other social media platforms where degens congregate. But it does have that election-year theme going for it, complete with some crazy-looking bluebirds.
The election part is more than a theme too— this meme coin features a very unique and interesting vote-to-earn feature, so participants can earn more by voting on the platform’s decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) using their $FLOCK tokens.
