Last Friday, a couple of days before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, he launched his own cryptocurrency, a meme coin named, appropriately, $TRUMP.
Amid the ceremonial pomp, the coin’s value skyrocketed by over 300 percent over the weekend. As of Thursday, the market capitalization of $TRUMP is hovering around $7 billion with only 200 million of the 1 billion tokens yet released. The remaining 800 million tokens are owned by Fight Fight Fight and CIC Digital, an affiliate of the Trump Organization. At the coin’s current value, Trump has a total stake exceeding $30 billion, or over three times his suspected net worth of $7.5 to $10 billion, though of course that’s all on paper.
Meme coins often disappear as quckly as they rise in value, often leaving hoodwinked investors—rather than, say, Trump—holding the bag. Perhaps that’s why $TRUMP’s website has a clear disclaimer declaring the coin an artwork.
“TrumpMemes are intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol ‘$TRUMP’ and the associated artwork, and are not intended to be, or to be the subject of, an investment opportunity, investment contract, or investment of any type,” it reads.
(A cryptocurrency is typically labeled a meme coin if it has no intrinsic function but originates from an internet meme, like DOGE coin. In contrast, the coin Ether is used to trade on the blockchain platform Ethereum, which allows users to build smart contracts, among a host of other applications.)
In a LinkedIn post on Tuesday, Georg Bak, a digital art advisor and co-founder of The Digital Art Mile art fair, noted the disclaimer and declared that Trump had issued “the most expensive artwork ever created in the world.” The meme coin, he went on, is valued far higher than Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi—the generally accepted highest valued artwork, which sold for $450 million in 2017. Because $TRUMP was classified as art by the issuer, Bak continued, it is therefore an “artwork co-owned by thousands of coin holders and can be regarded as a tokenized artwork.”
“Each holder of the $TRUMP is a legit co-owner of the currently most valuable artwork in the world,” Bak stated. “It is almost grotesque that art is once again serving as a proxy for carrying out otherwise illegal activities in a clean manner. While most types of coins are under strict supervision, art and therefore all meme coins enjoy artistic freedom, a fundamental right of humanity.”
After seeing Bak’s post, ARTnews asked the advisor why Trump might have categorized the coin as art. Bak speculated that the decision likely has less to do with Trump’s secret desire to be an artist than the legal protections such a declaration can afford the issue.
“Labeling [$TRUMP] as art can provide certain protections, avoid legal challenges, or redefine its purpose in ways that align with legal or regulatory frameworks,” Bak said. “One of the biggest legal challenges for cryptocurrencies and meme coins is being classified as a security under financial regulations like the Howey Test [a standard set by the US Supreme Court in 1946]. If a coin is deemed a security, it must comply with strict regulations that require registration, disclosures, and compliance measures. By declaring a meme coin as art or as a cultural product, its creators can argue that it is not an investment vehicle but a collectible or a creative expression.”
Andres Guadamuz, a reader in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Sussex, similarly told ARTnews that classifying a meme coin like $TRUMP as art “is usually a legal workaround, a clever ploy if you will.”
“Some meme coins projects try to avoid being labelled as securities, so they slip in language describing their tokens as ‘art’ or ‘collectibles.’ That way, they can argue that they’re selling a digital artwork rather than offering an investment product,” Guadamuz said. “While regulators in the new administration may not come knocking, this ensures that projects can be future-proof. People can sell and trade art with practically no regulation, and this is easier to do because of NFTs—tokens as art have a precedent that was left mostly unregulated. But if you’re selling a token as an investment vehicle, that is open to securities regulation.”
In essence, by terming the coin as an artwork, the issuers of $TRUMP shift the coin’s primry purpose away from financial speculation and possibly the watchful eye of the Securities and Exchange Commision. Other “celebrity-led coins,” like $HAWK, Shiba Inu, Moon, and Pepe-related coins have done the same, said Guadamuz.
As Bak and Guadamuz explained, $TRUMP is by no means the first time a cryptocurrency has been passed off as art.
The most notable example might be artist Sarah Meyohas, who launched BitchCoin in 2015, where each token was tied to Meyohas’s photography. As the artist wrote on BitchCoin’s website at the time, the coin “allows art collectors to invest directly in Sarah Meyohas as a value producer rather than investing in the artwork itself.”
Then, of course, there has been the long history of NFT series like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks, which have often been traded like currency while still finding their way into the collections of museums and digital art collectors. Though, in case of an NFT, it conveys ownership of the unique piece, which is just a digitized version of how we understand art to function. With $TRUMP and other meme coins, there’s just the token.
It’s unlikely the weekend’s buzz over $TRUMP is the last we’ve heard of it. On Sunday, First Lady Melania Trump launched her own meme coin, $MELANIA, which also declares itself an artwork. It currenlty has a market cap of $474.5 million.
For his part, Trump seemed to be mostly oblivious to the coin, telling reporters this week, “I don’t know much about it other than I launched it, other than it was very successful.”
The organization behind $TRUMP did not respond to ARTnews‘ inquiries about why, exactly, the coin was declared an artwork.
